A 20 -year -old Palestinian suffering from serious malnutrition that was evacuated from Gaza to Italy this week has died, said a Pisa hospital.
The woman, appointed by the Italian media under the name of Marah Abu Zuhri, arrived in Pisa on a humanitarian flight of the Italian government on Wednesday evening. Zuhri had come to Italy with his mother on one of the three flights to the Italian Air Force who arrived this week with a total of 31 critical patients with serious congenital illnesses, injuries or amputations, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said at the time.
According to Pisa University Hospital, she had a “very complex clinical image” and was “in a state of deep organic waste”, said doctors in a press release.
On Friday, after having undergone tests and started treatment, she underwent a sudden respiratory crisis and cardiac arrest and died.
The hospital did not explain its condition, but Italian press agencies reporting health care sources said it was suffering from serious malnutrition.
More than 180 children and young people in Gaza have been brought to Italy since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas.
According to the United Nations World Food Program, a third of the Palestinian population in Gaza goes for days without eating, and half a million are on the verge of famine, said in July.
“The worst case of famine is currently taking place in the Gaza Strip,” said the integrated classification of the food security phase (IPC) last month, calling for an urgent cease-fire to mitigate “generalized famine”.
According to the United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs Coordination (OCHA), five other people died last week due to malnutrition and famine, bearing the total number of deaths related to malnutrition to 227, including 103 children since October 2023.
Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said last month: “There is no famine policy in Gaza, and there is no famine in Gaza.”
However, even Donald Trump, the key international ally of Netanyahu, when he was asked if he agreed with the Israeli Prime Minister, said: “I don’t know … These children look very hungry … It’s real famine things.”
Thousands of sick children in Gaza need urgent medical evacuation, according to OCHA.
Olga Cherevko, agency spokesperson, recalled the moment when she recognized a young girl requiring treatment in a Gaza hospital that she had met a year earlier, suffering once more malnutrition.
“I remembered her long eyelashes,” said the humanitarian veteran on Tuesday, describing Janah, seven years old, whom she met at the hospital adapted to the patients of Gaza City.
“The first time I met her was at IMC Field hospital in southern Gaza in April 2024. At the time, she was seriously malnocked and had a treatment. And she gradually became better and was finally released and returned home.”
However, Janah was now back to the hospital “because malnutrition has worsened and the condition that it has no longer diagnosed and cannot be properly diagnosed”.
The girl was on a list of people to evacuate medically for treatment outside Gaza. The most recent evacuations took place on Wednesday when the World Health Organization supported the transfer of 32 children and six adults to Italy, Belgium and Turkey, but more than 14,800 patients are still waiting.
Cherevko stressed the importance of ensuring that evacuations continue to save as many lives as possible.
She pointed out that for children and adults suffering from pre -existing conditions, their situation gets worse with malnutrition.
“It would not be so if they had good nutrition, because these conditions existed before the famine crisis and that they do not become as sick as they are now,” she said.
