While waiting to enter Gaza on a medical aid mission, an American doctor watched Israeli security forces confiscate the cans of powdered baby formula packed in his luggage. The vital product is desperately lacking in the Palestinian enclave, where about 50 children have died of hunger since March.
At the end of June, an American doctor was preparing to travel to Gaza for a medical mission. His suitcases were filled with cans of baby formula, gauze, bandages and sanitary pads. He believed he was doing the right thing: The Palestinian population of the enclave, bombarded and starved by the Israeli army, lacks everything. While in Amman, a mandatory gathering point for foreign medical missions heading to Gaza, the coordinator of the convoy, Palestinian-German ophthalmic surgeon Diana Nazzal urged him to lighten his load. “If you only have medical supplies and no personal belongings, you risk being turned away, or even jeopardizing the whole mission,” she explained.
The American doctor followed her instructions, reducing the baby formula in his luggage to three cans. Once at the Allenby Bridge crossing between Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, however, his personal belongings were searched by Israeli security guards manning the terminal on the Palestinian side.
“The baby formula was confiscated,” said Nazzal. “What other explanation is there, if it’s not that hunger is being used as a weapon of war in the ongoing genocide in Gaza?” Local health workers said baby formula is desperately lacking in the enclave, especially specialized formula for premature babies or lactose-free formula for babies with intolerances. Many mothers, suffering from malnutrition, are unable to breastfeed.
‘Severe malnutrition’
COGAT, the branch of the Israeli army that coordinates the entry of humanitarian aid, told the Associated Press that more than 1,000 metric tons of baby food, including infant formula, have been delivered to Gaza since May 19, when Israeli authorities very slightly eased the complete humanitarian blockade imposed on the coastal territory for two and a half months.
Dr. Ahmad al-Farra, head of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, where premature babies are cared for in incubators, sounded the alarm in mid-June: Stocks of specialized formula for premature infants were on the verge of depletion. Since then, some cans supplied by the American organization Rahma have arrived, but only in limited numbers.
According to Palestinian news agency Wafa, two babies who had been treated at Nasser Hospital were buried on Thursday, June 26. They died of hunger and lack of necessary care. Nidal was 5 months old, and Kinda had only lived for 10 days. Between early March and mid-May, 57 children died of malnutrition, according to the Hamas Health Ministry, a figure also reported by the World Health Organization (WHO). UNICEF reported that in May alone, over 5,000 children aged 6 months to 5 years were admitted for treatment of acute malnutrition, a scourge that did not exist in Gaza before the war.
Baby formula is not the only item viewed with suspicion at the Allenby Bridge. British orthopedic surgeon Graeme Groom, whose speciality is, along with anesthesiology, one of the most sought in Gaza, said he was “not allowed to bring anything with him” for the first time in May, upon his fourth mission to Gaza in 20 months of war. No scalpel, no staples, no circular external fixators used to stabilize fractures and thereby “reduce the risk of infection and, therefore, amputation.”
Having known Gaza before the war, when the medical system was considered advanced and local staff benefited from training by foreign practitioners, he described a territory “where children are diagnosed with severe malnutrition every day, and where I saw babies who were just skin and bones.”
‘Turning away medical professionals’
Like other doctors, Groom said conditions for entering Gaza have become increasingly stringent since medical missions have been obliged to depart from Jordan and thus transit through Israeli territory. “These obstacles have greatly diminished the care available in Gaza,” he said. Prior to the Israeli army offensive on Rafah in May 2024, doctors were able to bring supplies to the enclave via Egypt.
Doctors also expressed concern about the growing number of rejections to enter Gaza. COGAT often issues refusals the day before leaving Amman, even though the WHO-approved applications are submitted to the Israeli agency two weeks before. “The last-minute notifications make our response difficult. Rejected doctors are not replaced,” said Thaer Ahmad, an American emergency physician of Palestinian descent who traveled to Gaza in 2024. He has faced several refusals since then, most recently in June. Only one member of the convoy of health workers he was supposed to join, a midwife, was among the 15 humanitarians granted access. He sees these restrictions as part of the ongoing “unraveling of Palestinian health and education institutions.”
At the start of the war, the priority for medical missions was to support Gaza’s doctors, who were often highly skilled but overwhelmed by the influx of the wounded. Since then, more than 1,000 medical workers have been killed, according to the United Nations, and many others have been arrested. “Today, foreign doctors come to support young, inexperienced colleagues. Some are still interns,” emphasized Nazzal, who completed a mission in February. “The injuries they are faced with are very complicated to treat.”
The rejection of doctors “cuts Gaza’s last link to the outside world,” Ahmad said. Entry refusals appear to target, in particular, practitioners of Palestinian origin and those who speak to the media upon their return. “Speaking out means risking not being able to return to Gaza. But staying silent means letting Gazans be killed in silence,” said Catherine Le Scolan-Quéré, a French general practitioner who worked at Nasser Hospital in fall 2024.
- Photo: A Palestinian woman feeds one of her 2-month-old twins amid ongoing baby formula shortages in Gaza, June 25, 2025. EBRAHIM HAJJAJ/REUTERS