Unicef ​​spokesperson from Gaza: “The children are paper thin”

“Children are paper thin due to malnutrition“, laments James Elder, UNICEF spokesperson who is currently in the Gaza Strip, where he has been able to travel to the north and witness the famine that is already looming over its population and that has claimed the lives of 27 children. .

“We are beginning to see how children are dying of hunger, in the crudest literal sense.“, he stated in a telephone interview with EFE from Rafah, after having visited the Kamal Adwan hospital, in the north of the enclave, and having contemplated the total devastation in Gaza City or Khan Yunis.

The visit to Kamal Adwan, in Beit Lahia – in the northern part of the enclave – has been one of the experiences that has most marked this humanitarian worker where more than twenty babies have died from malnutrition and dehydration in the last month: “The children are paper thin, and the mothers and grandmothers are tied to their beds, crying, begging to last another day.”

“I have never seen, in my 20 years at the United Nations, a place where the nutritional situation has worsened so much in such a short time, to the point where we have caused a famine.“explained Elder, who already entered the Strip last December in the middle of the war between Israel and the Islamist group Hamas, which has claimed the lives of more than 32,200 Gazans in five and a half months, including 14,200 children.

Last week the UN published a report stating that half of the population of the Strip is at risk “imminent” from suffering famine of catastrophic dimensions, while the enclave does not receive even half of the basic humanitarian aid it needs, much less in the north.

Hunger did not exist in Gaza six months ago and now one in three children under two years of age suffer from acute malnutrition, a crisis that is worsening at high speed, said the UNICEF spokesperson, and that ratio is already double what it was. in January.

Precisely, the commissioner general of the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, denounced yesterday that Israel had informed the United Nations that it was not going to authorize more humanitarian convoys from UNRWA – which he accuses without conclusive evidence of links with Hamas – to the north, where hunger is already a reality.

“People’s ability to survive has been shattered; Access to water and food has deteriorated as the bombing has continued. Fewer and fewer hospitals are operating at a time when more and more children need medical care”Elder summarized how the situation has worsened since his previous visit within the enclave.

“Families have had to move again due to the fighting. The stress of leaving even more things behind by moving fewer and fewer belongings. I have never seen entire cities crumbled and annihilated“, Add.

However, Elder gives a glimmer of hope, and that is that the famine is “avoidable and reversible” since it has been caused by man, and can still be solved with political will. “Opening more land access routes is a simple first solution”, he indicated.

At this time, Israel, after subjecting it to exhaustive controls, only allows the entry of humanitarian aid through two of the nine crossings into the Gaza Strip – Kerem Shalom and Rafah, on the border with Egypt -, both in the south, so that humanitarian agencies need security guarantees to be able to reach the north and convoys have frequently been subjected to attacks, in addition to the destruction of roads.

According to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Government, some 560 people have died in attacks on food trucks or warehouses or in incidents related to the distribution of aid, as occurred on February 29 in the so-called “flour massacre”, in which 118 Gazans died and more than 700 were wounded in a chaotic aid distribution in Gaza City in which Israel admitted to having opened fire.

Elder acknowledged that the difficulties in distributing aid in the Gaza Strip are endless, nothing compared to the problems in other conflict places such as Afghanistan, Somalia or Ukraine.

“It’s getting harder and harder to find words to describe what I see“, lament.