Gaza’s Government Media Office has accused Israel of exacerbating Palestinian children’s suffering through its ongoing blockade, which has led to widespread acute malnutrition affecting more than 65,000 hospitalised children out of 1.1 million facing daily hunger, Al Jazeera reports.

Israel is “using starvation and thirst as systematic weapons of war against civilians, in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law”, it said in a statement.

The statement added that “the continuous closure of border crossings has caused a catastrophic deterioration in health conditions, especially among children and infants”.

The office placed full responsibility on Israel for the worsening humanitarian disaster and for “endangering the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, women and elderly people due to the lack of food, medicine and clean water”.