UNICEF warns children in Gaza risk “dying before their families’ eyes”

By Thaddeus Jones

The United Nations lead agency for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide has warned that three thousand malnourished children in southern Gaza are at immediate risk of dying as ongoing violence and displacement continue to impact access to healthcare facilities and services for desperate families. UNICEF is doing all possible to ensure the provision of life-saving treatments for moderate to severe acute malnutrition.

Acting immediately before too late

In a UNICEF press release on 11 June, Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Adele Khodr decried “horrific images” that “continue to emerge from Gaza of children dying before their families’ eyes due to the continued lack of food, nutrition supplies, and the destruction of healthcare services.” She warned that unless treatment for these vulnerable children can resume, “they are at immediate and serious risk of becoming critically ill, acquiring life-threatening complications, and joining the growing list of boys and girls who have been killed by this senseless, man-made deprivation.”

While the life and death situation in southern Gaza has reached critical levels following the escalation of the Rafah offensive, UNICEF has noted there has been a slight improvement in the delivery of food aid to the north.

Meeting care needs

Aid workers are very concerned over the rising cases of malnutrition across the Gaza Strip as only two of the three centres that can treat seriously malnourished children are functioning, while plans for opening new ones are on hold due to the continuing violence. Care for a child with acute malnutrition requires six to eight weeks of special care, therapeutic food, safe water, and other medical support, all in extremely limited supply.

Assuring safety, hoping for a ceasefire

Since October 2023, UNICEF has provided life-saving services to tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza with prevention and treatment services for malnutrition. Adele Khodr says they have nutrition supplies ready for delivery, but they seek “assurances that humanitarian operations can safely collect and distribute aid to children and their families without interruption,” and this means a stop to the war, and ultimately, “a ceasefire that children need most.”