A doctor in Gaza describes the horror of starvation

In 2018, while on a medical mission near the Gaza border, an Israeli sniper shot Dr. Tarek Loubani in both legs. Despite this, Loubani, an emergency room specialist and activist, has returned to Gaza almost every year from his home in Canada to help treat Palestinians. For the last two months, he has been working out of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

The reports coming out of Gaza over the last month have been grim. Aid groups say a “worst case for famine” is playing out in the strip. The United Nations and humanitarian organizations report that only a fraction of the needed aid has been delivered to a starving population. One in three people have not eaten for days, according to a recent UNICEF report, and 80 percent of deaths of children in the region are due to starvation. A whistleblower told Mother Jones that aid distribution in the region is “abhorrent.”

These reports come in stark contrast to the publicity around efforts by the Trump Administration, including the touting of the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF). Last week, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and President Trump’s Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff spent more than five hours touring a GHF food distribution site in Rafah, where the UN says more than 1,373 Palestinians have died trying to access aid since late May.

“Over 100 MILLION meals served in 2 months,” wrote Ambassador Huckabee in a post on X shortly after his trip. This week, Huckabee said that the US would throw in its support to expand the GHF from 4 sites to a total of 16 sites across Gaza. This is despite the Financial Times reporting the sites are “death traps” where hungry Palestinians go for food only to be shot at by the Israeli Defense Forces. (In a statement, the Gaza Humintarian Fund said reports about its failures are part of a “disinformation campaign” and some doctors in the region are “not aiding civilians, they’re aiding Hamas.”)

Dr. Loubani is about seven miles from Rafah. He spoke to Mother Jones last week about conditions on the ground.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve said that you’ve seen starvation in every patient that you’ve seen. What is that like in medical terms? 

So when I first came, I understood that Palestinians hadn’t eaten for two months. But I was in denial about how bad it was. What I saw was that every day, patients were bad. I remember the first time that I saw a little girl, she was eight months old, brought to me—she was sticks and bones and she was dead. And her father had brought her for resuscitation because he assumed there was something we could do.

Realizing this is real… The patients kept getting thinner over the two months I’ve been here, until the point around a month ago, where I had to admit to myself that I’m not seeing any patients with fat anymore. I’m not seeing any patients where I can’t make out their ribs, or I can’t make out their spine.

The starvation, truly, is a hundred percent. What I can tell is that somebody used to be overweight before—you know, you can see how much skin they have or had. But right now every single patient that I see is suffering from some level of malnutrition, and most of the patients that I see are suffering from moderate to severe forms of malnutrition.

Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Ambassador Mike Huckabee just made an unprecedented trip into Gaza, supporting the claim that the Gaza Humanitarian Fund has had 100 million meals served in just two months. Based on what you’ve been seeing, do you find that to be an accurate estimate?

The idea that a hundred million meals have been served is laughable.  It would mean that there wouldn’t be such a level of famine, which is clearly not the case.  

Palestinians are literally in a death run every single time that the GHF opens.  Everything that my patients tell me is that they have to cross Israeli lines while under fire. They have to bunker down, wait until the GHF opens, and some days they don’t. 

On the issue of starvation in Gaza, President Trump told Axios that “we want to help people. We want to help them live. We want to get people fed. It is something that should have happened [a] long time ago.” What would you say to President Trump?

 President Trump and everybody around him belongs in jail.  What they have done is to actively support and perpetuate a genocide. Words with no actions are completely meaningless. President Trump can, with quite literally one phone call, as we saw in January, end this thing; the American government can literally end this thing.

 These statements don’t bother me in the sense that I don’t think about them. I don’t wonder about the veracity. I see how fake this kind of news is and how much these people are lying. If Trump genuinely cared about Palestinians, then he wouldn’t be behaving as he’s behaving now.

 There is no sane human being who can look at the situation and not see a pile of war crimes and evidence of genocide everywhere that they look at this point. Anyone who doesn’t recognize what’s happening in Gaza as war crimes and a genocide is not serious. They are propagandists and that is it.

 The only reason why people wonder if it is genocide is because of the tremendous interest in not declaring a genocide by very important countries—because that triggers legal obligations.  Once you call it a genocide, it puts you under obligation. And what we’ve realized now is that for all of these countries that wrote these laws about genocide, they were never actually interested in putting themselves in uncomfortable positions against allies. They just wanted to use them as batons against other countries.

There has been some recent activity of Western countries coming out and expressing their support for recognizing a State of Palestine over the last few weeks, notably France and the United Kingdom. In light of the current state of the state, how does the prospect of this kind of international recognition translate on the ground?

 What’s needed is not recognition of a Palestinian state. Palestinians don’t need their state to be recognized. It exists—and it’s happening. What the Palestinians need is for participants like France, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom to stop arming Israel.

You’ve been to Gaza several times in the past, but after being cleared on this recent trip, what were you expecting to see, and what have you been surprised to see?

 I wanna draw you a little picture. I first came to Palestine, to Gaza, in 2011. I have been spending four months a year here ever since, until this war.  I’m very, very familiar with this place.  I remember making this realization in the 2010s that, oh my God, as bad as it is, and as much as I would always say to myself, it can’t possibly get worse than this, it always got worse because there were always more ways to turn the screws on Palestinians.

 So I knew it was gonna be bad when I came. I knew it was gonna be bad.  But there is no preparing you for this. During the previous wars, kids got killed. Of course, they got killed. They got crushed. They got bombed. They got shot. But this war, it’s as though the kids are the only targets. There are so many kids, and it’s so devastating, and there’s so little I can do for them.  Nothing could have prepared me for that.

In every other war, there has been something missing. In 2014, we ran out of gauze. In 2012, we didn’t have stethoscopes. This war, we’re missing everything. And so what’s different this time on in terms of the the patients is that I have nothing that I can do for most of them, but sit there and watch them die—knowing that even if I can do a little bit to get them to the next step, they’re probably not going to heal well because they’re starving.

That’s the biggest difference for me.

Some readers might be asking themselves, “What can I do?” So, what do you think they could do to perhaps apply pressure to change the situation that’s taking place in Gaza right now? 

 I think the first thing to recognize is that everything people have done so far has helped. Every protest people have gone to, every letter they’ve written, every donation they’ve made—it has all helped. We think of things in terms of, you know, I’ve been to 10 protests. Why hasn’t it stopped? That’s because we’re not strong enough to make it stop in 10 protests.

But there is also a war of attrition happening, not just in the field, in Gaza, but also politically.  So, for example, what the UK is doing right now is directly the result of their weekly protests and their increased organizing. It has been political attrition. Also, the tremendous boycott movement has resulted in economic attrition.

 So, I think what this kind of person should look to do is to extract the highest cost possible on Israel and its supporters, like the United States, especially so that they can take an account of how much they’re losing and rethink this—by continuing to make sure that you run people in elections, that you keep it an active political issue, that you protest, that no politician who supports the genocide is comfortable.