Children starving to death in northern Gaza: WHO
An aid mission to two hospitals in northern Gaza found horrifying scenes of children dying of starvation, amid dire shortages of food, fuel and medicines, the World Health Organization.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Monday the agency’s visits over the weekend to the Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals “were the first since early October 2023 despite our efforts to gain more regular access to the north of Gaza”, AFP reported.
The findings were “grim”, he said on X, adding that “the situation at Al-Awda was particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed”.
The Kamal Adwan hospital, the only pediatrics hospital in northern Gaza, was overwhelmed with patients, he said.
“The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children,” Tedros said.
In all, the Gaza health ministry has said at least 16 children have died of malnutrition in aid-deprived northern Gaza.
The United Nations warned last week that famine in the Gaza Strip was “almost inevitable” because of the war that has been raging in the Palestinian territory since the beginning of the Israel’s onslaught on Gaza on October 7.
In addition to the dire lack of food at the two northern hospitals, Tedros also cautioned on X that “the lack of electricity poses a serious threat to patient care, especially in critical areas like the intensive care unit and the neonatal unit”.
The WHO chief reiterated an appeal to Israel to “ensure humanitarian aid can be delivered safely, and regularly”.
“Civilians, especially children, and health staff need scaled-up help immediately,” he said, stressing though that “the key medicine all these patients need is peace. Cease-fire.”
A senior UN aid official recently warned that at least 576,000 people across the Gaza Strip – one quarter of the population – faced catastrophic levels of food insecurity and one in six children under the age of two in the north were suffering from acute malnutrition.
And the regional director of the UN’s children’s agency, UNICEF, said “the child deaths we feared are here, as malnutrition ravages the Gaza Strip”.
“These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable,” Adele Khodr said in a statement on Sunday.
Israel’s has killed more than 30,500 people so far, mostly women and children, according to the health ministry in Gaza.