A picture taken on August 18, 2025, shows tents housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza City. Photo: AFP /Omar Al-Qattaa
Save the Children New Zealand says its medical teams in Gaza are facing an overwhelming tide of hunger and disease, with more than half of all new and expectant mothers deemed to be malnourished.
It comes as a United Nations-backed monitor (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC) has declared a famine in and around the blockaded Gaza City for the first time.
Israel says the report is false and relies on partial, biased data and superficial information originating from Hamas.
But Save the Children NZ chief executive Heather Campbell said its medical teams were facing starvation alongside the rest of the population.
She told RNZ there were no more alarm bells to ring.
"Babies, toddlers, children who haven't even lost their first tooth, are at risk of dying."
The IPC report said more than 500,000 people in the Palestinian territory were experiencing famine, more than half of them in Gaza City.
Campbell said colleagues were continuing to work despite the extremely difficult conditions, with some doctors seeing more than 100 patients a day - twice as many as recommended.
"In some cases we're seeing our colleagues who are almost fainting from hunger. It's not good.
"They have their own families, they have their own concerns and are still showing up every day and doing their best for children."
She said the current trickle of aid into the strip was nowhere near enough, and many effects of famine in children could not be reversed, leading to life-long mental and physical health issues.
Campbell urged politicians to put pressure on the Israeli government to allow the unfettered access of aid and bring an end to the food shortage.
"It needs to happen today, it needs to happen yesterday.
"Every day we wait, we're seeing children starving and once we've reached this critical famine moment we can do a lot to bring children back from the brink - in some cases it will be too late - but we need to start now.
"It needs to be immediate, it needs to be now, now, now, in order to save lives."
In a statement, released in New Zealand through the Embassy of Israel in Wellington, the Israeli government denied there was a famine, saying the information used to compile the IPC report was "often laundered through organisations with vested interests".
The statement said the UN report was a "one-sided approach" that "completely disregards the extensive humanitarian efforts undertaken in Gaza".
It said information provided by Israel was ignored claiming more than 100,000 trucks of aid - including more than 132 million meals - had entered Gaza since the war's start in 2023.
"Like previous IPC assessments on Gaza, it disregards Israel's extensive humanitarian efforts and ignores Hamas' deliberate obstruction and exploitation of aid… The report also relies heavily on other UN data, which have been established to include only partial information, as well as being biased, and include non-public internal documents, many sourced from entities linked to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry.
"This makes independent verification of claims, such as thousands of malnourished children and recent hunger-related deaths, impossible."
It said on the Gazan side of the crossing, hundreds of truckloads of humanitarian supplies were still waiting to be collected by the UN.
Israel has blocked international journalists from independently reporting inside Gaza. New Zealand this week joined more than two dozen other countries to call for foreign media access.
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