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06-03-2024
UNITED NATIONS/ GAZA CITY: Children are dying of starvation in northern Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) chief says.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency’s visits over the weekend to the Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals were the first since early October.
In a post on social media, he spoke of “grim findings”.
A lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children and “severe levels of malnutrition”, while hospital buildings have been destroyed, he wrote.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza reported on Sunday that at least 15 children had died from malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan hospital.
A 16th child died on Sunday at a hospital in the southern city of Rafah, the Palestinian official news agency Wafa reported on Monday.
Dr Tedros reported “severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed” in northern Gaza, where an estimated 300,000 people are living with little food or clean water.
“The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 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 the north of Gaza”, he wrote.
“The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed,” he added.
The UN warned last week that famine in Gaza was “almost inevitable”.
A senior UN aid official 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.
The Israeli military launched a large-scale air and ground campaign to destroy Hamas which is proscribed as a terrorist organization by Israel, the UK, US and others after the group’s gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel on 7 October and took 253 back to Gaza as hostages.
More than 30,500 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory’s health ministry.
Almost two million people in Gaza, most of the population are reported to have fled their homes since Israel began its military operation in response to Hamas’s deadly attacks of 7 October.
The Strip has been under the control of Hamas since 2007 and Israel says it is trying to destroy the military and governing capabilities of the Islamist group, which is committed to the destruction of Israel.
Gaza, a densely populated enclave 41km (25 miles) long and 10km wide, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea on one side and fenced off from Israel and Egypt at its borders has “simply become uninhabitable”, according to United Nations officials. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
