Gaza ‘most dangerous place in world to be a child’: UNICEF

UNITED NATIONS: Gaza, which continues to be under deadly Israeli attacks, is by far the most dangerous place in the world to be a child and deaths of youngsters from disease will likely surpass those from bombardment in the absence of a ceasefire, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned on Tuesday.

“A lack of food, water, shelter and sanitation continues to put children’s lives at risk as they suffer under relentless airstrikes with no safe place to go,” said UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder, who recently returned from the besieged enclave.

Ahead of a UN Security Council meeting on a pause in fighting to facilitate aid access, he told reporters in Geneva: “Every single child is enduring these 10 weeks of hell and not one of them can escape.”

“As a parent of a critically sick child told me, ‘Our situation is pure misery…I don’t know if we will make it through this’,” he said.

According to the Gaza health authorities, over 19,400 Palestinians have been killed in the enclave since October 7 when the hostilities between Israel and Hamas erupted.

Over 52,000 Palestinians have been injured and their access to life-saving care is extremely limited. UN health agency WHO said on Tuesday that only eight of the 36 hospitals in the Strip were at least partially functional.

Hospitals were overwhelmed with children and their parents, all bearing “the ghastly wounds of war”, Elder said. He stressed that while in the Strip he encountered many young amputees. Around 1,000 children in Gaza had lost one or both their legs, he said.

From the UN World Health Organization (WHO), spokesperson Dr Margaret Harris added that WHO staff in Gaza spoke of not even being able to walk in the emergency wards “for fear of stepping on people” lying on the floor “in severe pain” and asking for food and water.

She called the situation “unconscionable” and said that it “is beyond belief that the world is allowing this to continue”.

Over the past 48 hours, the largest remaining hospital in Gaza, Al Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the south, was shelled twice, Elder said. That hospital “not only shelters large numbers of children who had already been badly injured in attacks on their homes, but hundreds of women and children seeking safety”, he stressed, referring to those who have had to flee because of the hostilities and evacuation orders.

Some 1.9 million people, or the vast majority of the enclave’s population, are estimated to be displaced in Gaza.

Injured children dealing with the loss of loved ones had been forced to move again and again, Mr Elder said. “Where do children and their families go? They are not safe in hospitals. They are not safe in shelters. And they are certainly not safe in the so-called ‘safe’ zones,” he insisted.

The UNICEF spokesperson said that the “safe zones” were “anything but safe” because they had been designated unilaterally by Israel alone and lacked “sufficient resources for survival”: food, water, medicine, protection.