The head of Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City said on Tuesday that 21 children had died across the Palestinian territory in the past three days "due to malnutrition and starvation".
"These deaths were recorded at hospitals in Gaza, including Al-Shifa in Gaza City, Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah and Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis... over the past 72 hours", Mohammed Abu Salmiya told reporters (as reported by Yahoo News yesterday).
It came as UN Secretary General António Guterres told the UN Security Council that "malnutrition is soaring" and "starvation is knocking on every door" in Gaza.
The UN agency for children (UNICEF) have reported that the number of malnourished children in Gaza was rising at an “alarming rate”. They said that at least 5,119 children, between 6 months and 5 years of age, had been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition in May alone.
The stark reality on the ground is already just as alarming and frightening. Food markets are empty. Human waste is piling up. Illness is spreading.
And people in Gaza are "collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration”. That’s the stark warning issued by more than 100 international humanitarian organizations on Wednesday, in a joint statement calling on Israel to end its blockade, restore the full flow of food, clean water and medical supplies to Gaza, and agree to a ceasefire.
"Every day without a sustained flow of aid means more people dying of preventable illnesses”, said the statement, signed by Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children, the Norwegian Refugee Council and dozens of other NGOs. “Children starve while waiting for promises that never arrive".
The US-based medical humanitarian group MedGlobal also said in a statement that their nutritional teams in Gaza had witnessed five severely malnourished children, aged between three months and four years old, die in the past four days.
"This is a deliberate and human-made disaster", MedGlobal's executive director, Joseph Belliveau, said. "Those children died because there is not enough food in Gaza and not enough medicines, including IV fluids and therapeutic formula, to revive them".
MedGlobal said that since the beginning of July, cases of acutely malnourished, mainly children, had nearly tripled at their facilities, indicating a widespread food crisis.
The fact is, Israel’s deadly blockade is a “deliberate use of starvation as a weapon to exterminate civilians”. And Gaza's children bear the brunt of the prevailing starvation.
Stay silent when children sleep, not when they are being starved to death in Gaza!
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