On the morning of May 15, Miran Mohammad was helping her grandfather bake bread at his home in Beit Lahia, a town in northern Gaza. Given the scarcity of food, the 7-year-old Miran was hungry and was eager to have a piece of the freshly baked bread. She wouldn’t get the chance.
Miran’s mother insisted she wait to eat until the family returned to their home. As they entered their house, it was hit in an airstrike, collapsing on top of them and causing them both serious injuries.
Miran is now a patient at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital; doctors tell us her legs permanently damaged. She is one of the more than 3,700 children under 18 years old in Gaza reported to have reportedly been wounded since the end of the recent cease-fire. Over 1,300 other children are reported to have been killed in hostilities during the same period. Through nearly 20 months of war, nearly 17,000 children have been reported killed and more than 34,000 have been wounded — around one in every 20 children in Gaza — making it the deadliest conflict for children in recent memory.
With the threat of famine growing by the day, the plight of Gaza’s children will surely worsen. According to the latest analysis from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a tool used by UNICEF and its partners to assess food security and malnutrition, the entire population of Gaza now faces acute food insecurity. Nearly half a million people are teetering on the edge of starvation. We estimate that over 71,000 children and 17,000 mothers will suffer from acute malnutrition, characterized by rapid weight loss and low weight-to-height ratio, in the next 10 months without sufficient humanitarian aid and treatment.
UNICEF and its partners are doing everything possible to respond. Yet because of Israel’s two-month-long blockade of aid, now unevenly lifted, we have extremely limited stocks in Gaza. Unless we regain safe, sustained access to Gaza and are allowed to scale up, more children will suffer.
On Tuesday, the world watched as thousands of hungry Palestinians in Rafah rushed to get food from a new aid delivery system backed by Israel that bypasses the United Nations as the main aid supplier in the territory. As the chaotic scenes made clear, rather than increasing access to lifesaving supplies, the new aid distribution plan, facilitated by an organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, threatens to make things worse.
