STORY: At six months pregnant, Fatima Arfa just wants to deliver a healthy, safe child.
But she suffers from malnutrition and fears losing the baby, as Israel continues a military campaign that has led to widespread hunger.
Displaced like most Palestinians in Gaza, she longs for staples like milk, eggs and red meat that could help the baby's chances - and hers.
"Today, I'm suffering. I need to have blood unit transfusions, blood units. I'm coming from a faraway place, and on foot too, because I need to have a blood transfusion because of a very big deficiency, malnutrition."
Doctor Fathi al-Dahdouh, director of external clinics at Al-Helou Hospital in Gaza City, says Arfa has anemia and needs blood.
"God willing, two units of blood will be transfused to her and later we hope that God will stop this war and open the crossings so that green food supplies, fruits, and vitamins can enter, along with these things."
Arfa is getting weaker by the day and generating enough energy on a meager diet is a huge challenge for her.
Yet she spends much of her time walking long distances in the heat and under Israeli bombardment to seek help from Gaza's ravaged healthcare system.
In June, the U.N.'s OCHA agency warned an estimated 55,000 pregnant women in Gaza face risks such as miscarriage, stillbirth and undernourished newborns.
Forced to flee her home in northern Gaza, Arfa lives in a makeshift tent with her husband Zahi and their five children aged three to 14.
Zahi says most Gazans live mainly on lentils.
Sometimes he wanders the flattened neighborhoods desperate for flour...
... or for anything that could give his wife the strength to produce life in Gaza, where Israeli strikes have killed more than 57,000 people, according to local health authorities.
"More than once, I was exposed to death," he says. "I failed every time I tried to even get a can of tuna or a can of peas for the children. I couldn't."
