UNICEF reports the number of malnourished kids in the Gaza Strip is increasing at an ‘alarming rate’. 66 children have died from malnutrition during Israel’s war in Gaza, officials in the Palestinian enclave reported, blaming a tightened Israeli blockade that has kept milk, nutritional supplements and other food aid out.
The Gaza Government Media Office statement on Saturday follows Israeli forces ramping up their assault on the territory, leaving at least 60 Palestinians dead, including 20 individuals in Gaza City’s Tuffah neighbourhood.
The media office has stated that Israel’s killing blockade is a “war crime” and its “explicit use of starvation as a weapon to kill civilians.”.
The office condemned what it termed “this continuous crime against childhood in the Gaza Strip” and “the shameful international silence about the plight of children who are left to become victims of hunger, disease, and slow death”.
It also stated it blames Israel, and its supporters, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, for “this catastrophe”, and called upon the United Nations to move in and open the crossings into Gaza immediately.
The statement followed days of warning from the UN Children’s Agency (UNICEF) that malnourished children in the Gaza Strip were increasing at an “alarming rate”. It reported at least 5,119 children aged 6 months to 5 years had been admitted for treatment of acute malnutrition in May alone.
UNICEF reported the number is a close to 50 per cent jump from 3,444 children admitted last April, and an increase of 150 per cent since February when a truce was held and aid was flowing into Gaza in large amounts.
Within 150 days, between the beginning of the year and the end of May, 16,736 children – 112 children per day on average – have been hospitalised for treatment of malnutrition in the Gaza Strip,” stated the agency’s Middle East and North Africa regional director, Edouard Beigbeder.
Each of these cases is avoidable. The food, water, and nutrition therapies they so desperately require are being denied them,” he said. “Man-made choices that cost lives. Israel must immediately permit the mass transfer of lifesaving assistance across all crossings.
