image source, Getty Images
A woman and child stand inside a makeshift tent at Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza.
The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said that children are starving to death in northern Gaza.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the agency's weekend visit to Al Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals was the first since early October.
Ten children died due to food shortages, “severe malnutrition” occurred and hospital buildings were destroyed, he wrote.
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry reported on Sunday that at least 15 children had died from malnutrition and dehydration at Kamal Adwan Hospital.
A 16th child died at a hospital in the southern city of Rafah on Sunday, Palestinian state news agency Wafa reported on Monday.
Dr Tedros warned of “severe malnutrition, children starving to death, severe shortages of fuel, food and medicine, and destroyed hospital buildings” in northern Gaza, where an estimated 300,000 people live with little food and clean water. reported.
“10 children died due to lack of food,” he posted on X (previously known as Twitter).
He wrote that the visit was WHO's first in recent months “despite efforts to secure more regular access to northern Gaza.”
“The situation at Al Awda Hospital is particularly bad because one of the buildings has been destroyed,” he added.
The United Nations warned last week that famine in Gaza was “almost inevitable.”
At least 576,000 people, a quarter of the population across the Gaza Strip, face catastrophic levels of food insecurity, with one in six children under two in the north suffering from acute malnutrition, a senior United Nations aid official said. warned that he was suffering from
The regional director of UNICEF, the United Nations children's agency, said: “The child deaths we feared are here as malnutrition ravages the Gaza Strip.”
“These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and completely preventable,” Adel Hoddle said in a statement on Sunday.
But aid agencies say such drops, which have also been carried out in the UK, France, Egypt and Jordan, are an inefficient way to get supplies to people.
Israel said the tanks fired warning shots but did not hit the trucks and many of the dead were trampled or run over.
But Hamas disputed this, saying it had “undeniable” evidence of “direct firing on civilians.”
Some aid agencies are facing difficulties negotiating with authorities. Philippe Lazzarini, head of UNRWA, the UN's main human rights agency in the Gaza Strip, on Monday accused the Israeli government of trying to “eliminate” Israel's presence in Gaza.
Israel has long accused various branches of the United Nations, including Unruwa, of bias and even anti-Semitism. Several Western countries, including Britain, suspended funding to UNRWA after Israel accused some of its staff of involvement in the October 7 attack.
Mr Lazzarini said this was not simply a response to “violations of neutrality by some officials”, but also a plan to “remove refugee status and ensure that it is not part of a final political solution”. He said there were broader political motives, including: ”.
He added that dismantling his organization would lead to the collapse of the entire humanitarian response in Gaza.
After Hamas militants killed around 1,200 people and left 253 dead in southern Israel on October 7, the Israeli military announced its plan to destroy Hamas, which is banned as a terrorist organization by Israel, Britain, the United States and others. A large-scale air and ground operation was launched to Return to Gaza as a hostage.
Since then, more than 30,500 people, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza, according to the Gaza Strip's Ministry of Health.
WATCH: Devastation after aid drop in Gaza leaves dozens dead
