UNICEF’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Adele Khodr released this statement Sunday:
“At least ten children have reportedly died because of dehydration and malnutrition in Kamal Adwan Hospital in the Northern Gaza Strip in recent days. There are likely more children fighting for their lives somewhere in one of Gaza’s few remaining hospitals, and likely even more children in the north unable to obtain care at all.
“These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable.
“The widespread lack of nutritious food, clean water and medical services, a direct consequence of the impediments to access and multiple dangers facing UN humanitarian operations, is impacting children and mothers, hindering their ability to breastfeed their babies, especially in the Northern Gaza Strip. People are hungry, exhausted and traumatized. Many are clinging to life.
“The disparity in conditions between the north and south is clear evidence that aid restrictions in the north are costing lives. UNICEF and WFP malnutrition screenings in the north in January found that nearly 16 per cent - or 1 in 6 children under 2 years of age - are acutely malnourished. Similar screenings conducted in the south in Rafah, where aid has been more available, found 5 per cent of children under 2 years are acutely malnourished.
“Humanitarian aid agencies like UNICEF must be enabled to reverse the humanitarian crisis, prevent a famine, and save children’s lives. For this we need multiple reliable entry points that would allow us to bring aid in from all possible crossings, including to northern Gaza; and security assurances and unimpeded passage to distribute aid, at scale, across Gaza, with no denials, delays and access impediments.
“UNICEF has been warning since October that the death toll in Gaza would increase exponentially if a humanitarian crisis emerged and was left to fester. The situation has only gotten worse, and as a result, last week, we warned that an explosion in child deaths was imminent if the burgeoning nutrition crisis wasn’t resolved.
“Now, the child deaths we feared are here and are likely to rapidly increase unless the war ends and obstacles to humanitarian relief are immediately resolved.
“The sense of helplessness and despair among parents and doctors in realizing that lifesaving aid, just a few kilometres away, is being kept out of reach, must be as unbearable, but worse still are the anguished cries of those babies slowly perishing under the world’s gaze. The lives of thousands more babies and children depend on urgent action being taken now.”
On CNN, Melanie Ward, the CEO of Medical Aid for Palestinians, described conditions in Gaza as "the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. We could save them all. But we're not being able to."
Ishaan Tharoor at The Washington Post reported Friday:
Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid. “We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling sick from hunger and thirst because of Israel’s entry restrictions,” Jan Egeland, chief of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said in an email statement after a recent visit to Gaza. “Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked, and women and children are paying the price.” [...]
Perhaps most agonizing in all this is the ordeal of Gaza’s children. There are myriad anecdotes of babies and children wasting away without adequate food and dying from poisoning due to consuming animal feed, which some are substituting into their diets in the absence flour. UNICEF, the U.N.’s children’s agency, estimated in February that about 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied or separated from their families. A generation of Palestinian children will be scarred by the toll of the war, the obliteration of their homes and schools, and the deep trauma of evading bombs while grieving loss.
Jane Arraf at NPR affiliate KUOW radio reported Friday that Janti Soeripto, the CEO of Save the Children, said that in early February when she visited the Rafah crossing on Gaza’s Egyptian border a month ago, fewer than 140 aid trucks were making it in every day. Before the war about 500 a day was average:
"At the time, I said surely it can't get any worse and then every week I've been proven wrong," [she said, adding that] the number of trucks able to cross was as low as fewer than 25 some days, with Israel rejecting many trucks from crossing and sending others back without unloading after they were allowed to enter. [...]
"It's incredibly difficult to get supplies to people where they need it and to do that safely and securely," Soeripto said, adding that northern Gaza was particularly hard hit by lack of food and a crumbling medical system.
She said one Save the Children staffer in a maternity ward in Gaza reported that doctors were sending premature infants home to die because they did not have incubators to treat them. At least six children have died so far from malnutrition or from eating animal feed, the only food available, according to aid groups.
For some time Jordan has been making airdrops of food and other supplies into Gaza. And the United States started doing so Saturday and plans more. Several aid organizations, including Save the Children, have called the airdrops inadequate.
But ABC News reported Sunday:
Chef and humanitarian José Andrés, whose nonprofit World Central Kitchen has been sending significant aid into Gaza amid the Israel-Hamas war, on Sunday pushed back on criticism that airdrops into the Palestinian territory are wrong because they are hypocritical and insufficient compared to broader solutions.
"We need to bring food into Gaza any way we can," Andrés told ABC News "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl, calling the situation there "desperate."
According to the U.N., more than 570,000 people in Gaza are on the brink of experiencing famine levels of hunger due to the continuing conflict.
While Andrés said the broader goal should be to simply allow a "daily, constant and massive" flow of trucks into Gaza, "I don't think we need to be criticizing that Jordan, America are doing airdrops. If anything, we should be applauding any initiative that brings food into Gaza."
Julian Borger at The Guardian reported Friday:
“In addition to expanding deliveries by land, as I said, we’re going to insist that Israel facilitate more trucks and more routes to get more and more people the help they need,” Biden said. “No excuses, because the truth is [that] aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough now. Innocent lives are on the line and children’s lives are on the line.
“We should be getting hundreds of trucks in, not just several,” he said. “And I won’t stand by, we won’t let up and we’re … trying to pull out every stop we can to get more assistance in.”
Biden and his administration have been trying unsuccessfully for months to persuade Benjamin Netanyahu to allow more aid into Gaza, but the president has opted so far not to use some of the powerful leverage the US has over Israel, including Israeli dependence on regular and substantial arms supplies.