Face of starvation in Gaza: 10-year-old dies of malnutrition, picture goes viral on social media

It is all too easy to trace the skull beneath the boy’s face, the pallid skin stretching tight over every curve of bone and sagging with every hollow.

His chin juts with a disturbing sharpness. His flesh has shrunk and shriveled, life reduced to little more than a thin mask over an imminent death.

In one of a series of news photographs of the boy, Yazan Kafarneh, taken with his family’s permission as he struggled for his life, his long-lashed eyes stare out, unfocused. In that widely shared picture online, his right hand, bandaged over an intravenous line, contracts in on itself at an awkward angle, a visible marker of his cerebral palsy.

He was 10, but in photographs from his last days at a clinic in the southern Gaza Strip, he looks both small for his age and at the same time ancient. By Monday, Yazan was dead. The pictures of Yazan circulating on social media have quickly made him the face of starvation in Gaza.

Aid groups have warned that deaths from malnutrition-related causes have only just begun for Gaza’s more than 2 million people. Five months into Israel’s campaign against Hamas and its siege of Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are close to starvation, UN officials say.