Gaza City: Once a refuge for families, Gaza City is now a place where “childhood cannot survive,” a leading UNICEF official said on Thursday.
“It is a city of fear, flight and funerals,” said Tess Ingram, the organization’s communications manager for the Middle East and North Africa, speaking from Gaza.
The world is sounding the alarm about what an intensified military offensive in Gaza City could bring — a catastrophe for the nearly 1 million people who remain there, she said.
The world is sounding the alarm about what an intensified military offensive in Gaza City could bring: a catastrophe for nearly 1 million people. But we cannot wait for the unthinkable to happen to act.”
“I met children who were separated from their parents in that chaos. Mothers whose children have died of starvation. Mothers who fear their children will be next. I’ve spoken to kids in hospital beds, their small bodies shredded by shrapnel,” she added.
Among the gravest emergencies in Gaza is the soaring rate of child malnutrition. Of 92 UNICEF-supported outpatient nutrition centers in Gaza City, only 44 remain operational.
“This is what famine in a war zone looks like,” Ingram said, describing overcrowded clinics filled with starving children and parents in despair. She told how many families survive on a single daily bowl of lentils or rice, shared among all members, with mothers skipping meals so that their children can eat.
“It is the direct consequence of choices that have turned Gaza City and indeed the entire Strip into a place where people’s lives are under attack, from every angle, every day.”
Ingram said that UNICEF continues to call on Israel to review its rules of engagement to ensure children are protected, as is required under international humanitarian law, and to allow sufficient aid to enter Gaza; on Hamas and other armed groups to release all the remaining hostages; on both parties to protect civilians and essential infrastructure, and to reinstate the ceasefire; and on the international community to use their leverage to end the current catastrophic situation in Gaza.
“Palestinian life is being dismantled,” Ingram said. “In Gaza City, the unthinkable has already begun. The cost of inaction will be measured in the lives of children buried in rubble, wasted by hunger, and silenced before they even had a chance to speak.”
