Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO
According to the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), children in northern Gaza are succumbing to starvation.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus mentioned that the WHO’s recent visits to the Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals over the weekend marked the first since early October. In a social media update, he shared distressing observations, reporting “grim findings”.
He noted that the absence of adequate food has led to the deaths of 10 children and has caused “severe levels of malnutrition”. Furthermore, he highlighted the destruction of hospital infrastructure.
The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza announced on Sunday that at least 15 children had succumbed to malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan hospital. On Monday, the Palestinian official news agency Wafa reported that a 16th child had died at a hospital in the southern city of Rafah.
Dr. Tedros, in a statement, highlighted the dire situation in northern Gaza, where approximately 300,000 individuals are grappling with severe malnutrition, starvation, and shortages of essential resources such as fuel, food, and medical supplies. He specifically mentioned that 10 children had lost their lives due to food scarcity.
He also noted that these visits by the World Health Organization (WHO) were the first in several months, despite efforts to gain more regular access to the northern regions of Gaza.
“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 – facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity and one in six children under the age of two in the north was 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, the 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.
