Middle-East

Children starving to death in northern Gaza - WHO

Palestinians wait to collect food at a donation point in a refugee camp in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, on December 23, 2023. (Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP)

By Barack Oduor | Tuesday, March 5, 2024

At least 15 children had died from malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan hospital.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) is worried over the increased death of children out of starvation in northern Gaza.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency's visits over the weekend to the Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals were the first since early October.

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In a post on Monday on social media, he spoke of "grim findings".

According to the WHO, lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children and "severe levels of malnutrition", while hospital buildings have been destroyed.

The Health Ministry in Gaza reported on Sunday that at least 15 children had died from malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan hospital.

The sixteenth child died on Sunday at a hospital in the southern city of Rafah, the Palestinian official news agency Wafa reported on Monday.

The visits were the WHO's first in months "despite our efforts to gain more regular access to the north of Gaza", he wrote.

The UN warned last week that famine in Gaza was "almost inevitable".

Food insecurity

A senior UN aid official warned that at least 576,000 people across the Gaza Strip - one-quarter of the population - faced catastrophic levels of food insecurity and one in six children under the age of two in the north were suffering from acute malnutrition.

Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed.

The visits over the weekend were the first… pic.twitter.com/CxaCuau7iR
— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) March 4, 2024

The regional director of the UN's children's agency, Unicef Adele Khodr said: "The child deaths we feared are here, as malnutrition ravages the Gaza Strip".

"These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable," Khodr said in a statement on Sunday.

Aid agencies said the airdrops of humanitarian aid into Gaza - which have been previously carried out by the UK, France, Egypt and Jordan - are an inefficient way of getting supplies to people.

The deliveries themselves have sometimes turned deadly. Last week, at least 112 Palestinians were reportedly killed when large crowds descended on lorries carrying aid while Israeli tanks were present.

Israel said the tanks fired warning shots but did not strike the lorries and that many of the dead were trampled or run over.

But this has been disputed by Hamas, which said there was "undeniable" evidence of "direct firing at citizens".

More than 30,500 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza since then, according to the territory's health ministry.