Three-year-old Maryam Abdullah Abu Daqa died not just from illness, but from a system designed to withhold life from Palestinian children. Her fragile body, worn down by malnutrition and disease, was one of thousands failing under a blockade that denies even the most basic right, the right to survive.

Maryam’s family had fought hard to secure permission for her treatment outside Gaza. Despite official approval, Israel’s endless delays and restrictions prevented her transfer. She lay in a hospital bed in Khan Younis, her body connected to tubes, as her father’s pleas echoed across media and social networks, but the walls of the siege did not break.

Her story is not an isolated tragedy. Tens of thousands of children across Gaza face the same grim fate, battling hunger, injuries, and chronic conditions in a health system crippled by war and deprivation. Hospitals are starved of fuel, medicine, and water. Doctors are forced to choose who lives and who dies.

Seventeen years of blockade have turned Gaza into a prison where children are born only to suffer. Maryam’s eyes, once full of hope, now bear witness to a world that looked away. Her death is not a statistic, it is an indictment.