Palestinian Boy In Photos That Showed Reality Of Gaza Famine Dies Of Malnourishment

Yazan al-Kafarneh, a Palestinian boy whose emaciated appearance offered the world a stark illustration of Gaza’s accelerating starvation crisis, has become one of the latest children in the territory to die of severe malnourishment.

Yazan was receiving medical treatment with the few resources available at Abu Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah, where more than a million displaced Palestinians are trying to survive without adequate shelter or food.

Graphic photos taken on Feb. 28 and March 2, which appear below, show Yazan emaciated and bedridden while covered in blankets and receiving fluids intravenously. The photos were reposted online by activists, journalists and pro-Palestinian accounts, showing the reality of a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza born out of Israel’s ongoing offensive and monthslong blockade of aid deliveries.

Yazan died of malnourishment on Monday, Al Jazeera reported. He was 10.

“This child had turned into a skeleton in this war before he died,” Muhammed al-Kafarneh, a relative of Yazan, told Al Jazeera in a video interview on Monday, as Yazan’s body was being cleaned and prepared for burial in the background.

“Hunger ravaged his body. This child was suffering from several diseases,” al-Kafarneh said. “The war came and took away all the basic components that could give him life.”

Yazan’s family was originally living in north Gaza ― which is facing its own starvation crisis ― before Israeli strikes displaced them several times. In a video on Instagram, Yazan’s father, sitting beside his emaciated son, shared a photo, taken a week before Israel began its offensive, of Yazan smiling and not visibly malnourished.

Hoping to find better health care for Yazan, who had