335 thousand children in Gaza are at risk of death due to lack of food and medicine

The United Nations Children’s Fund UNICEF has warned that all 335,000 children under five in the Gaza Strip are at high risk of acute malnutrition and death, which could have been prevented had it not been for the continued increase in the risk of famine. Gaza Strip children are at high risk of acute malnutrition and death due to famine. UNICEF noted that this unacceptable risk comes at a time when the health sector in the Gaza Strip has completely collapsed, and more than two-thirds of hospitals are no longer functioning due to a lack of fuel, water, and vital medicines, or because they were exposed to catastrophic damage as a result of the Israeli attacks. The UN organization has called for an immediate ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

Doctor Firas Hamad tried to save his child’s life from death after he suffered from a severe lack of oxygen, but all his attempts were in vain because there was no bed available for his child in the hospitals of the Gaza Strip, whose capacity exceeded 250 percent due to the increase in the number of wounded as a result of the ongoing Israeli occupation’s aggression for the eightieth day.

Doctor Hamad, who resides in a shelter center in the city of Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip after he was displaced from his home in Beit Hanoun in the north said he tried to save Qasim’s life by providing medicine and appropriate treatment, which was not available. “My son and hundreds of other children died as a result of their loss of treatment and food due to the comprehensive siege imposed by the occupation on the Gaza Strip”, Doctor Hamad said.

The condition of the child Qasim Hamad is no different from the condition of the child Mahmoud Al-Awawda, whose father explains that he is trying to treat him in hospitals in the middle of the Gaza Strip, saying: His condition is getting worse with the depletion of medicines and medical supplies in all hospitals, which have become completely unable to receive sick children so that they die silently in shelter centers and the areas that are besieged by the Israeli occupation forces.

Zakaria Salem, a displaced person in a shelter in Gaza, pointed out that the city ran out of infant milk completely a month ago, which caused hunger and deprivation for his twin children. He explained that he seeks to silence their hunger by providing milk that is not appropriate for their ages, which causes severe weakness in their bodies and diseases in their stomach.

Human rights researcher Hussein Hammad pointed out that 90 percent of the children in the Gaza Strip lost food security, treatment, and medical supplies as a result of the occupation’s aggression and its prevention of the entry of humanitarian aid, explaining that 135,000 children under the age of two are struggling to survive in light of the lack of all nutritional and therapeutic ingredients. 183 children are born every day inside shelter centers crowded with hundreds of thousands of displaced people, and their mothers do not have access to food, water, or proper health care.

NR