Achi news desk-
UNITED NATIONS – Israel has killed more than 13,000 children in Gaza since October 7 while others are severely malnourished and “don’t even have the energy to cry”, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund ( UNICEF). “Thousands more are injured or we can’t even determine where they are. They may be trapped under rubble … We have not seen that rate of death among children in almost any other conflict in the world,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell told CBS News, a leading American television network.
“I have been in wards of children suffering from severe anemia, the whole ward is completely silent. Because the children, the babies… don’t even have the energy to cry.” Russell said there were “very big bureaucratic challenges” moving trucks into Gaza for aid and assistance as famine claimed more than two million Palestinians since Israel’s “genocidal” war began.
Intense attacks by Israel in Gaza continued on Tuesday, with “a double-digit number of children killed overnight” and continued obstacles to the delivery of aid leading to near-famine conditions, UN humanitarians said.
The continued violence came despite an immediate ceasefire call for the rest of Ramadan by the Security Council on Monday, prompting urgent appeals from UN aid agencies for the resolution to be respected immediately, to prevent more deaths. Speaking from Rafah in southern Gaza, United Nations Children’s Fund spokesman James Elder said 13,750 children had now been killed since October. 7. Citing reports of “a double-digit number of children being killed overnight”, Elder noted that this happened “just hours after the (Security Council) resolution was passed”.
The city of Khan Younis in southern Gaza “barely exists anymore”, the UNICEF spokesman added, before describing the “complete devastation” of constant Israeli bombing which has left an untold number of children and families buried under the rubble of their homes.
“In my 20 years with the United Nations I have never seen such destruction, just chaos, ruins, debris and rubble in every direction, everywhere I look,” he said, recounting his latest aid trip to the north. Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis – “such a critical place for children with war wounds” – is no longer even functional, the UNICEF official reported, adding that only a third of Gaza’s hospitals are now “partially functional”.
Further north, where the UN World Food Program (WFP) aid mission secured the passage of 38 trucks carrying relief supplies on Monday – for the first time in five days – Elder described seeing people making “that general signal of hand to mouth, desperately asking and looking for food”. This is despite the fact that hundreds of trucks containing life-saving humanitarian aid are waiting across the border in Egypt, UN agencies have indicated.
