KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — The little boy is in tears and, understandably, irritable.

Diarrhea has plagued him for half of his brief life. He is dehydrated and so weak. Attached to his tiny left hand is a yellow tube that carries liquid food to his frail little system.

At 9 months old, Khaled is barely 11 pounds — half of what a healthy baby his age should be. And in Gaza’s main pediatric hospital ward, as doctors try to save her son, Wedad Abdelaal can only watch.

After back-to-back emergency visits, the doctors decided to admit Khaled late last month. For nearly a week, he was tube-fed and then given supplements and bottled milk, which is distributed every three hours or more.

His mother, nervous and helpless, says that’s not enough.

“I wish they would give it to us every hour. He waits for it impatiently ... but they too are short on supplies,” Abdelaal says. “This border closure is destroying us.”

The longer they stay in the hospital, the better Khaled will get.

But Abdelaal is agonizing over her other children, back in their tent, with empty pots and nothing to eat as Israel’s blockade of Gaza enters its third month, the longest since the war started.

Locked, sealed and devastated by Israeli bombings, Gaza is facing starvation.

Thousands of children have already been treated for malnutrition. Exhausted, displaced and surviving on basics for over a year and half of war, parents like Abdelaal watch their children waste away and find there is little they can do.

They are out of options.

Hospitals are hanging by a thread, dealing with mass casualty attacks that prioritize deadly emergencies. Food stocks at U.N. warehouses have run out. Markets are emptying. What is still available is sold at exorbitant prices, unaffordable for most in Gaza where more than 80% are reliant on aid, according to the United Nations.

Community kitchens distributing meals for thousands are shuttering. Farmland is mostly inaccessible. Bakeries have closed. Water distribution is grinding to a halt, largely because of lack of fuel. In desperate scenes, thousands, many of them kids, crowd outside community kitchens, fighting over food. Warehouses with few supplies have been looted.

The longest blockade on Gaza has sparked a growing international outcry, but it has failed to persuade Israel to break open the borders. More groups accuse Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war. Residents and humanitarians warn that acute malnutrition among children is spiraling.

“We are breaking the bodies and minds of the children of Gaza,” Michael Ryan, executive director of emergencies at the World Health Organization, told reporters in Geneva. “Because if we don’t do something about it, we are complicit in what is happening before our very eyes. ... The children should not have to pay the price.”

Israel imposed the blockade March 2, then ended a two-month ceasefire by resuming military operations March 18, saying both steps were necessary to pressure Hamas into releasing the hostages. Before the ceasefire collapsed, Israel believed 59 hostages were still inside Gaza, 24 of them alive.

Israel hasn’t responded to accusations that it uses starvation as a war tactic. But Israeli officials have previously said Gaza had enough aid after a surge in distribution during the ceasefire, and accused Hamas of diverting aid for its purposes. Humanitarian workers deny there is significant diversion, saying the U.N. monitors distribution strictly.

Khaled has suffered from malnutrition since he was 2 months old. His mother managed it through outpatient visits and supplements distributed at feeding centers. But for the past seven months, Abdelaal, 31, has been watching him slowly shrivel.

She, too, is malnourished and has had hardly any protein in recent months.

After an exhausting pregnancy and two days of labor, Khaled was born — a low-weight baby at 4 1/2 pounds but otherwise healthy. Abdelaal began nursing him. But because of lack of calcium, she is losing her teeth — and producing too little milk.

“Breastfeeding needs food, and I am not able to give him enough,” she says.

Khaled has four other siblings, aged between 9 and 4. The family has been displaced from Rafah and now lives in a tent further north in Mawasi Khan Younis.

As food ran out under the blockade, the family grew dependent on community kitchens that serve rice, pasta and cooked beans. Cooking in the tent is a struggle: There is no gas, and finding wood or plastic to burn is exhausting and risky.

Ahmed, 7 and Maria, 4, are showing signs of malnutrition. Ahmed, 7, weighs 17 pounds; his bones are piercing his skin. He gets no supplements at feeding centers, which serve only kids under 6. Maria, 4, has also lost weight, but there is no scale to weigh her.

“My kids have become so frail,” Abdelaal laments. “They are like chicks.”

Before the war, hundreds of families in Gaza were registered and treated for congenital defects, genetic or autoimmune disorders, a system that has broken down mostly because food, formulasor tablets that helped manage the diseases quickly ran out.

Dr Ahmed al-Farrah, head of the pediatrics and obstetrics ward at Nasser Hospital, says hundreds of children with genetic disorders could suffer cognitive disorders as well, if not worse.

“They are sentenced to death,” he says.

Osama al-Raqab’s cystic fibrosis has worsened since the start of the war.

Lack of meat, fish and enzyme tablets to help him digest food meant repeated hospital visits and long bouts of chest infections and acute diarrhea, says his mother, Mona. His bones poke through his skin.

Osama, 5, weighs 20 pounds and can hardly move or speak.

Canned food offers him no nutrition.

“With starvation in Gaza, we only eat canned lentils,” his mother says. “If the borders remain closed, we will lose that too.”

Abdelaal’s kids fetch water and wait in line at soup kitchens because she cannot. To get there, they must climb a small hill.

When she can, she waits for them at the bottom, fearing they may fall or drop the food.

When they do bring back food, the family divides it over several meals and days. When they get nothing, they share beans out of a can. Abdelaal often surrenders her share. “My kids,” she says, “are more deserving.”

Her husband, Ammar, has a heart condition that limits his movement, so he cannot help either.

“Because of lack of healthy food, even as adults, we have no energy to move or exert any effort,” Ammar says. “We are sitting in our tents, waiting for death.”