March 4, 2024
Updated 1 hour ago
Image source: Getty Images
image description,
A woman and a child stand between makeshift tents in the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip
Children are starving in the north of the Gaza Strip, says the head of the World Health Organization (WHO).
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency's weekend visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals were the first since early October.
A lack of food led to the deaths of 10 children and “severe malnutrition,” while hospital buildings were destroyed, he wrote.
The Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza reported on Sunday that at least 15 children had died of malnutrition and dehydration at Kamal Adwan Hospital.
A sixteenth child died in a hospital in the southern city of Rafah on Sunday, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported on Monday.
Dr. Tedros reported “severe malnutrition, starving children, severe shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, destroyed hospital buildings” in northern Gaza, where an estimated 300,000 people live with little food and clean water.
“The lack of food led to the deaths of ten children,” he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The visits were the WHO's first in months, “despite our efforts to gain more regular access to northern Gaza,” he wrote.
“The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly frightening as one of the buildings is destroyed,” he added.
The UN warned last week that famine in Gaza was “almost inevitable”.
A senior U.N. aid official warned that at least 576,000 people across Gaza – a quarter of the population – face catastrophic food insecurity and one in six children under two in the north suffer from acute malnutrition.
And the regional director of the UN children's fund Unicef said: “The child mortality we feared is here as malnutrition ravages the Gaza Strip.”
“These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely avoidable,” Adele Khodr said in a statement on Sunday.
However, aid groups said these drops – which have also previously been carried out by Britain, France, Egypt and Jordan – were an inefficient way to deliver aid to people.
Israel said the tanks fired warning shots but did not hit the trucks and that many of the dead were trampled or run over.
However, this was denied by Hamas, which said there was “indisputable” evidence of “direct shooting at citizens.”
Some aid organizations had difficulties with the authorities. Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations' main human rights agency in the Gaza Strip, UNRWA, accused the Israeli government on Monday of trying to “eliminate” its presence in Gaza.
Israel has long accused various branches of the United Nations, including UNRWA, of bias and even anti-Semitism. Several Western countries, including the United Kingdom, have stopped funding UNRWA after Israel accused some staff of involvement in the October 7 attacks.
Mr Lazzarini said this was not just a response to “violations of neutrality by some staff” but had a wider political motive, which included plans to “abolish refugee status and ensure that this is not part of a final political solution “. “.
He added that the dissolution of his organization would lead to the collapse of all humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military launched a large-scale air and ground campaign to destroy Hamas – which is banned as a terrorist organization by Israel, Britain, the United States and others – after the group's gunmen killed about 1,200 people and 253 people in southern Israel on October 7 captured and brought back to Gaza as hostages.
More than 30,500 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the region's health ministry.
video caption,
Watch: Devastation after dozens die during aid deliveries in Gaza