The Full Picture of
What Is Happening to Gaza's Children

Mohammad Al-Motawaq

His photographs shocked the world. Published in January 2025, images of Mohammad Al-Motawaq — then just 18 months old — showed a child so severely malnourished that his ribs pressed visibly against paper-thin skin, his eyes sunken, his limbs reduced to sticks. His face was hollow where a toddler's cheeks should have been full.

Dr. Suzan Mohammed Marouf began treating Mohammad at Gaza's overwhelmed malnutrition ward. Under her care, he began recovering. By February 2025, he had reached a healthy weight of 10 kilograms. He learned to stand. He began to speak his first words. For a brief, fragile moment, Mohammad was simply a child again.

Then the ceasefire broke. Food access was tightened. Supplies stopped reaching the ward. Within weeks, Mohammad had lost everything — his weight dropped back to 7 kilograms, far below the 10–12 kg healthy range. His ability to stand disappeared. His words stopped. He had been erased, twice.

"I watch him fade and I have nothing to give him," his mother told medical staff. "Nothing."

Hind Rajab

On January 29, 2024, five-year-old Hind Rajab was in a car with her family, fleeing Gaza City. Tank fire struck the vehicle. Six of her relatives were killed instantly. Hind survived — alone, surrounded by the bodies of her family, trapped in a car that was now a target.

She called the Palestine Red Crescent Society. For nearly three hours, Hind stayed on the phone with dispatchers. She was five years old. "I'm so scared," she told them. "Please come." The dispatcher, Rana Faqih, stayed on the line with her, promising help was coming. Hind asked her not to hang up.

Two paramedics — Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun — were dispatched in an ambulance. Both were killed. On February 10, after an Israeli military withdrawal, search teams found the ambulance — a burnt shell. Beside it, they found Hind.

Investigations by The Washington Post, Sky News, and Forensic Architecture concluded that Israeli tanks had fired on both the family vehicle and the rescue ambulance. Her case was cited at the UN General Assembly in September 2025. Her name is the reason the Hind Rajab Foundation was established — to ensure this never happens again.

She was five years old.

Huda Abu Al Naja

Before the war, Huda was a child with a medical condition that required only one thing: a gluten-free diet. She has coeliac disease. In any functioning society, this is manageable. In besieged Gaza, it has become a death sentence written in slow motion.

Huda's weight has collapsed from 35 kilograms to 19 — barely more than half her pre-war body weight. Everything available in Gaza's food supply contains gluten. She cannot eat what little is available without her body rejecting it. She is trapped in a double siege: the siege of Gaza, and the siege of her own body.

"She smiles and tries to be strong," her mother told ABC News. "She doesn't want me to see her cry. But I can see her disappearing in front of me, a little less every day."

Her doctors formally requested evacuation for treatment impossible to provide inside Gaza. As of August 2025, she remains in the strip, waiting.