…pregnant and breastfeeding women were acutely malnourished, according to them, in June.

Question:
Can you just explain to our viewers around the world what does the starvation and the malnutrition, that Palestinians are experiencing and enduring right now? What does that do to the human body? Can you speak to that?

Answer:
Yes. I think we’re seeing it in newborn babies, premature babies who are dying of malnutrition there. Mothers can’t even breastfeed because they are so malnourished, they lose weight clearly, but they start losing protein predominantly. Once they have lost the body fat, they start losing protein. They get much weaker. Their immune system is suppressed. They become much more susceptible to a whole variety of infectious diseases. If they have any existing diseases already, they become much worse. As the protein loss gets worse, their hearts start failing. The biochemistry of their blood, the chemicals and the blood become disarrayed, so they can develop severe arrhythmias of the heart. But the most dramatic effect, which I saw, was the effect of the malnutrition on their immune system, and essentially on their ability of their tissues to heal, for them to recover from major explosive injuries or major gunshot injuries. And of course, the surgery that we carry out to repair these injuries. So their tissues don’t heal. All the internal repairs we carry out, they are at a much higher risk of leaking, falling to pieces, causing more and more infections. So these bad injuries, injuries that we would expect most people to survive, they have a much higher risk of dying from as a direct result of their malnutrition.