Gaza Strip: Hunger Threatens One Million Palestinian Children

January 11, 2024 Hour: 5:07 pm

On Thursday, the NGO Save the Children accused Israel of preventing food from entering the Gaza Strip, endangering the lives of a million children in the territory.

RELATED:
Israeli War in Gaza is Like the Rwandan Genocide: South Africa

Denying them access to basic food and supplies will have lifelong consequences for Palestinian infants, should they survive, the organization warned in a statement.

One million of them in that coastal enclave do not have enough to eat, including some 335,000 under-fives who are at risk of severe malnutrition or starvation, it stressed.

“This is an entirely man-made catastrophe that is causing devastating physical and mental damage to children, with potentially life-threatening and life-altering consequences,” denounced Hannah Stephenson, Save the Children’s global director of Policy and Advocacy, Health and Nutrition.

#GAZA: More than 10,000 children have been killed by Israeli airstrikes & ground operations in Gaza in nearly 100 days of violence. Jason Lee: “For every day without a definitive ceasefire, 100 children on average have been killed.”#CeasefireNOW https://t.co/Va3kiwG5aL

— Save the Children MENA & Eastern Europe (MENAEE) (@scmenaee)
January 11, 2024

Stephenson noted that as they experience increased hunger, their bodies weaken, their muscles begin to waste away, their vision blurs and their immune systems fail.

Illness is inevitable, and pneumonia and diarrhea are the leading causes of death for children in this weakened state, he warned.

For her part, Elizabeth White, director of Save the Children in the occupied Palestinian territories, stressed that “deprivation of food, water and medicine makes child survival in Gaza almost impossible.

This week, the NGO reported that more than 1,000 Palestinian infants have lost one or both legs in the Strip since Oct. 7 to Israeli shelling.

Many of those amputations were performed under difficult conditions because the health system there is paralyzed by the conflict and there is a severe shortage of doctors and nurses, as well as medical supplies, including anesthesia and antibiotics, he said.

Catherine Russell, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, said last month that Gaza is currently the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.