Tess Ingram reports from Gaza hospitals as famine grips children. Video / Unicef
As ceasefire negotiations make global headlines, Gaza remains in the grip of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Catastrophic levels of hunger, injury, illness and displacement continue to impact millions of people. Unicef is poised with hundreds of supply trucks and continues to call for a lasting ceasefire thatallows aid organisations to roll out the massive response needed. In three diary entries written for the Herald from inside Gaza’s hospitals, nutrition clinics and emergency camps, Unicef humanitarian worker Tess Ingram outlines the human cost and what is at stake if a ceasefire doesn’t hold.
Day 1: Gaza City - hospitals
The day begins just after sunrise. Our small team leaves the Unicef house in Gaza City and starts driving east towards where we can see bombs falling on the horizon. Dust swirls on the pot-holed roads, and where shops and houses once stood, there are towering piles of rubble. Families poke their heads out from the ruins as we drive past. We are headed to three hospitals today and I already know that each one will be full of stories that are hard for me to carry, but deserve to be told.
At the Patients Friends Hospital, I meet Jana. She’s 9, but so small for her age, her body frail from repeated bouts of malnutrition. I am jolted as I realise I remember her from April 2024, when Unicef helped evacuate her for treatment further south. She looks very different from the last time I saw her – shrunken into herself, her eyes huge and dark. She recovered previously, but her family returned home during the February ceasefire and then aid blockades brought hunger back. Now she is fighting for her life once more and I can see it doesn’t look hopeful. Her mother sits beside her bed, her eyes fixed on her daughter’s fragile chest rising and falling. She tells me softly: “I don’t want to go through the pain of losing another child.” Jana’s sister, Jouri, died of malnutrition a few weeks earlier.
At Al Helou Hospital, we enter the neonatal intensive care unit. Machines hiss and beep in uneven rhythms, but it is otherwise silent. Doctors peer into tiny machines, hoping their patients are holding on. Unicef has supplied incubators and medicines here, but the doctor explains they are operating at 200% capacity with each single-size incubator holding several pre-term babies. The smallest among them looks like they could fit on to the palms of my hands. Their survival depends on electricity and supplies that are never guaranteed and it’s a stark realisation that the sounds of the unit are a literal lifeline. If the machines go silent, children will die. And with the military offensive in Gaza City escalating, that is a real and potentially imminent risk. The doctor tells me plainly: “If we must evacuate, how do we move them? How do we keep them alive? The bombing has to stop”.
Al Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, is overwhelming. The air is thick, humid, and carries the faint sourness of disinfectant. I have been to Shifa many times since October 2023 and today is the busiest I have seen it - 41 children under 16 are here today, many with critical war injuries. There is no space left, so beds spill into hallways, and children are laid out on the floor. One little boy, his face pale and contorted in pain, screams piercingly as doctors prepare for what will probably be the amputation of his arm. He should be somewhere else, playing, laughing and safe, not in here like this. The staff move with extraordinary calm, but I can see the fear and fatigue etched into every face, including his mother’s.
Unicef aid worker Tess Ingram reports from Gaza about how the war and famine is affecting children in a three-part Gaza diary series for the NZ Herald.
By the time we leave, the light is fading. I eat the one meal I will have today, rice and a few stewed vegetables, and spend my time preparing for upcoming media interviews to help tell these children’s stories. The contrast between the world the polished presenter is in, and the one around me here in Gaza is so extreme but straddling these two worlds while standing in Gaza is the best way for us to try and express what is happening to children here, especially given that international media outlets are still prevented from sending journalists into the Strip.
Finally, late that night, I crawl into bed. As my head hits the pillow, moments from the day are replaying in my mind - the voices of children quietly telling their story, parents begging for their child’s survival, while doctors improvise in conditions no one should have to endure. Every hospital corridor echoes the same truth: this should be a place of healing, not of anxiously waiting for the next strike or the next critically injured child. Children should never have to face this, yet they are the ones filling hospital wards, corridors and floors.
(Footnote: I learned later that 9-year-old Jana died of malnutrition. Our deepest condolences go to her mother, Nesma, and the rest of their family. I can’t begin to imagine the grief of losing two children from something that could have been prevented.)
Famine is no longer just a threat in Gaza City; it’s now a daily reality. This morning, I went with our nutrition team to three treatment sites. Our mission must be approved by the Israeli authorities in advance and every movement from point to point coordinated in real time, because the areas we enter are within declared military zones. Even with the clearances, there is no guarantee of safety for humanitarian workers. I remember a previous mission where our clearly marked convoy was fired on. I try to focus on the families who are waiting and pile myself into the car with my camera gear.
The day is warming rapidly, and at the first site in eastern Gaza City, the queue stretches out the door to where the heat forms a mirage on the street. Parents clutch their children, hoping for food, formula, treatments, or even just reassurance. The steady chatter of families and cries of infants helps to mask the sound of the bombs and shelling, just a few kilometres from us. Inside, staff work without pause, their exhaustion already visible at this time of the morning, but their focus somehow unwavering. We are screening women and children, diagnosing malnutrition, counselling mothers on breastfeeding and providing therapeutic food and supplements. In the corner, I meet a 1-year-old girl, Careema. Her hair feels brittle when I reach out to stroke her head, and her thin fingers cling to her mother’s clothes. The woman breaks down when I ask what they manage to eat each day. “Barely anything,” she sobs. “We share one cup of rice.”
In the Gaza Strip, the entire child population under five – over 320,000 children – are at risk of acute malnutrition. Unicef distributes ready-to-use therpeutic food, as seen here at a screening and distribution in North Gaza on 26 August 2025.
Around us, dozens more children are being weighed and measured. They are confused, restless. Some will be diagnosed with acute malnutrition today, adding to the statistics; the percentage of children identified as acutely malnourished across Gaza increased to 13.5% in August, up from 8.3% in July. It’s even higher in Gaza City itself – 19% in August, up from 16% in July. It’s a creeping crisis killing children in the shadow of the violence.
We drive to the next clinic – there the waiting room is so crowded I lose my team. I can’t quite accept that this is just one of dozens of treatment centres in Gaza City alone. The need is immense. I find it hard to reconcile the abundance in my local supermarket with what I see here. My colleagues are distributing Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food - small sachets of a nutrient-dense mixture, a bit like oily peanut butter, that can bring a starving child back from the brink. Staff are trained to diagnose malnutrition early, to prevent children from slipping further into danger. But the sheer number of children I’m seeing in this centre alone is overwhelming.
Unicef teams feed malnourished children with ready-to-use therapeutic food that can bring them back from the brink of starvation.
Every parent I speak to says they are doing all they can to shield their children from the physical weapons, but fighting hunger, thirst and disease is something else entirely. The food in the markets is limited and expensive, far beyond their means, and while organisations like ours are managing to get aid in, it’s a trickle when it needs to be a flood.
As we leave the last clinic, the team is very quiet. I think back to the whispered conversations I had with parents at the nutrition sites - mothers trying to figure out how long rations will last, fathers wondering how to keep their children alive, older siblings now responsible for scavenging food for their younger ones. It should never be this way because this is a preventable, man-made famine, pure and simple. Parents know what their children need, they just can’t grasp it. Unicef knows how to address this – we’ve been working for years in the most challenging and conflict-affected places on the planet. But we need to be allowed to do our job.
The world must see and validate that Gaza’s children are starving, however hard it is to look at. They don’t have the opportunity to turn away, and neither should we. This is what famine in a war zone looks like, and it is everywhere I look in Gaza City in the faces of small, frightened children.
Day 3: Al Mawasi, South Gaza
Today, I travel south by car to Al Mawasi. It is a short distance, but it takes us a few hours to get here, on dusty roads jammed with families on the move with all their remaining possessions. Al Mawasi has been unilaterally declared a “safe zone”, but there is little here that feels safe. Displaced people continue to arrive, carrying stories of flight, fear, and unbearable loss, only to be faced with the prospect of assembling a makeshift tent on baking hot sand, far from any service that might help them survive
I meet Sera, a mother of five. Her youngest child, Zain, is less than a month old. He was born on the side of a road in Gaza City as evacuation orders were issued and bombs fell nearby. Sera describes the panic of trying to find help, the terror and pain of giving birth without support. She recounts the horror with such bravery but her husband stares at his feet, clearly upset by remembering what should have been such a moment of joy. Not long after Zain was born, the family was displaced again, and then again, as airstrikes followed them. Eventually, they reached Al Mawasi.
Now, in a tent they can borrow for just a couple of days, Sera cradles her newborn. She shows me how she has cut fabric into strips to use as nappies, because it’s all she has. Zain’s skin is sore and covered in a rash. A doctor told her she needs clean cloth, soap, water and cream, and she knows this too, but even basic items like this are out of reach. Sera’s voice is calm, but the tremble in her hands as she tends to her baby gives away her exhaustion. She gave birth just a few short weeks ago after all. “I only want him to be healthy,” she says. She doesn’t know where she will find food for her children tonight, water tomorrow or where the family will go once they have to give this tent back.
Walking through the settlement, I can see it’s obvious the population here has increased far beyond what this sandy piece of land can hold. The tents are crammed so tightly together that guy ropes crisscross the paths, leaving only narrow strips where people weave between buckets and cooking fires. Yet in amongst this hardship, families are looking out for each other, and children are improvising games. I hear some laughter - the resilience of children in an environment like this is an incredible thing to witness. They are playing with a kite made from pieces of discarded plastic and rope. This is my fourth stint in Gaza, and it still brings a big smile to my face to see children getting a chance to be simply that – children.
Unicef aid worker Tess Ingram reports from Gaza about how the war and famine is affecting children in a three-part Gaza diary series for the NZ Herald.
Unicef and our partners are scaling up our response in Al Mawasi. We are working to improve access to safe water and sanitation, setting up nutrition services to prevent malnutrition from spreading further south, and supporting families with essential supplies. But the numbers are daunting. Every day more people arrive, and the needs grow. The forced mass displacement of families is a deadly threat for the most vulnerable and it is inhumane to expect nearly half a million children battered and traumatised by two years of unrelenting conflict to flee from one hellscape to end up in another.
What strikes me today is how displacement has stripped families of dignity. Parents who once provided homes and routines now struggle for the most basic needs for their children. Even just a clean blanket, a safe drink of water, or a nappy for a newborn.
As I leave, I look back once more at Sera holding Zain. In her arms, he looks impossibly tiny, yet his survival depends on choices far beyond her control. Children like him are being born into this situation. Their parents are doing everything humanly possible to protect them, but without aid, it is not enough. This is not the life any child should inherit, and it does not have to be this way.
Despite the extremely challenging conditions, Unicef remains in Gaza providing lifesaving food, water and hygiene kits to children and their families. Please donate to support children at Unicef.org.nz
