Children starving to death in northern Gaza, warns WHO

Gaza: Children are dying of starvation in northern Gaza, the World Health Organisation (WHO) chief said.

Dr. 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.

In a post on social media, he spoke of “grim findings”.

A lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children and “severe levels of malnutrition”, while hospital buildings have been destroyed, he wrote.

The health ministry in Gaza reported that at least 15 children had died from malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan hospital as the Israeli occupation forces continue to disallow humanitarian access to Gaza.

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

Dr. Tedros reported “severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed” in northern Gaza, where an estimated 300,000 people are living with little food or clean water.

The visits were the WHO’s first in months “despite our efforts to gain more regular access to the north of Gaza”, he added.

“The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed,” he added.

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

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.

And the regional director of the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, 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,” Adele Khodr said in a statement.