UNICEF warns Gaza City becoming 'place where childhood cannot survive'

HAMILTON, Canada

A senior UNICEF official on Thursday warned that Gaza City, the last refuge for families in the northern Gaza Strip, is becoming a place "where childhood cannot survive."

"Gaza City, the last refuge for families in the northern Gaza Strip, is fast becoming a place where childhood cannot survive. It is a city of fear, flight, and funerals," UNICEF Communications Manager for the Middle East and North Africa Tess Ingram told reporters virtually from the Gaza Strip during a news conference.

"The unthinkable is not looming; it is already here," Ingram said, warning: "The escalation is underway."

She detailed harrowing encounters with families forced to flee multiple times and said: "I met children who were separated from their parents in that chaos. Mothers whose children have died of starvation. Mothers who fear their children will be next. I've spoken to kids in hospital beds, their small bodies shredded by shrapnel."

Ingram warned that the collapse of essential services is leaving Gaza's youngest and most vulnerable "fighting for survival."

She noted that only 44 of UNICEF's 92 outpatient nutrition treatment centers in Gaza City remain functional, depriving thousands of malnourished children of critical support.

"This is what famine in a war zone looks like, and it was everywhere I looked in Gaza City," she said.

Emphasizing that UNICEF has been working to respond, she said the agency has provided ready-to-use therapeutic food for more than 3,000 acutely malnourished children in the past two weeks.

However, Ingram stressed that efforts remain far below the needs.

"Our team is doing everything in its power to help children. But we could do far more, reach every child here, if our operations on the ground were enabled at scale and we were well funded," she added.

Palestinian life, she said, is "being dismantled here, steadily but surely."

Ingram emphasized that "the suffering of children in the Gaza Strip is not accidental. It is the direct consequence of choices that have turned Gaza City and indeed the entire Strip into a place where people's lives are under attack, from every angle, every day."

Reiterating UNICEF's call on Israel to review its rules of engagement to protect children under international humanitarian law, she also urged the international community "to use their leverage to end this. If not now, when?"

Ingram added that UNICEF requires $716 million for its Gaza response this year but is only 39% funded, with nutrition just 17% funded.

When asked about the personal toll of her work, she said she has cried with mothers in Gaza and told them, "I'm so sorry that the world has failed you … the world has failed your children."

"The cost of inaction will be measured in the lives of children buried in rubble, wasted by hunger, and silenced before they even had a chance to speak," she said.