Gazan health officials said that two of the children who died from malnutrition were less than two days old. While cautioning that it was difficult to say what had happened without more information, Stobaugh said that malnutrition in pregnant mothers and the lack of formula could easily have led to the deaths of infants, who are the most vulnerable to extreme malnutrition.

That dovetailed with an account given by an aid group, ActionAid, which said that a doctor at Al-Awda maternity hospital in northern Gaza had told the group that malnourished mothers were giving birth to stillborn children.

Yazan’s parents had struggled for months to care for their son, whose condition, experts say, would have meant he had trouble swallowing and needed a soft, high-nutrition diet. After the Israeli bombardment on Gaza following the October 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel, his parents fled their home, taking Yazan and their three other sons to somewhere they hoped would be safer.

“Day after day, I saw my son getting weaker,” said his father, Shareef Kafarneh, a 31-year-old taxi driver from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza.

Eventually, they ended up in Al-Awda, in the southern city of Rafah, where Yazan died last week. He had suffered from both malnutrition and a respiratory infection, according to Dr Jabr al-Shaer, a paediatrician who treated him. Al-Shaer blamed the lack of food for weakening Yazan’s already frail immune system.

Obtaining enough to eat had already been a struggle for many in the blockaded Gaza Strip before the war. An estimated 1.2 million Gaza residents had required food assistance, according to the United Nations, and about 0.8 per cent of children under 5 in Gaza had been acutely malnourished, the World Health Organisation said.

Five months into the war, that appears to have spiked: about 15 per cent of children under age two in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished, as well as roughly 5 per cent in the south, the World Health Organisation said in February. With half of all infants in Gaza fed by formula, Stobaugh said, the lack of clean water to make the formula is compounding the crisis.

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Adele Khodr, the Middle East director at UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, said this week: “These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable.”

The situation has left parents frantic.

World leaders are increasingly warning about catastrophic hunger in Gaza, and even some of Israel’s closest allies are pressing Israel to do more. US President Joe Biden announced last week that the US military would set up a floating pier to help move supplies into the enclave.

On Friday, the Israeli agency known as COGAT, which regulates aid to Palestinians, said, “Israel is also exerting a constant and significant effort to find solutions that will bring aid more smoothly into the Gaza Strip, and into its northern area in particular.”

Before war tore Gaza apart, Yazan Kafarneh was gradually seeing an improvement in his long struggle with cerebral palsy, his family said.

Physical therapists provided by nonprofits treated him at home, while medicines helped improve his condition, his father said. He might not have been able to walk, but he could swim. Kafarneh carefully planned out a high-nutrient diet for his son based around soft foods, including eggs for breakfast and the bananas Yazan loved.

But the medications disappeared as the war broke out, and as the family’s food supplies dwindled, Kafarneh said he had been unable to maintain Yazan’s special diet. He swapped out eggs in the morning for bread he made into mush using tea; he struggled to find bananas, so he tried giving Yazan other sweet foods, even though the price of sugar had soared. The already difficult challenge of feeding him properly turned nearly impossible.

On February 25, his family brought Yazan to Al-Awda’s paediatric wing. He had pneumonia, which his weeks of hunger and already fragile condition had aggravated. Although the doctors and nurses gave him antibiotics for the infection, they could not find a reinforced nutrition drink that had been used to nourish him before the war, said Halima Tubasi, a nurse who cared for Yazan before he died.

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Kafarneh said the cause of his son’s death was no mystery.

“The foods he used to have aren’t being eaten any more,” he said. “The medicines and supplementary foods weren’t available at all.”