Children receive care at a field hospital in southern Gaza. Gaza Strip: every 10 minutes a child becomes a victim of military action Peace and Security
Nearly 10,000 women have been killed in Gaza since the war began six months ago. One child is injured or dies every 10 minutes. The UN made the announcement on Tuesday amid a new wave of violence in the West Bank and fears of a regional escalation of the conflict following Iran’s missile attack on Israel.
Some 6,000 Palestinian mothers were among those killed, leaving 19,000 children orphaned, according to a new UN Women report. More than a million women and girls in Gaza have virtually no access to food, clean water, latrines or hygiene products. Diseases spread rapidly in such conditions, report says.
Meanwhile, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a new call for a ceasefire that would allow humanitarian organizations to support the reconstruction of hospitals , including Al-Shifa: it was destroyed as a result of the recent siege.
“The hospital administration is trying to clean up the emergency department, but it requires a lot of work, not to mention the need for medical supplies,” said WHO spokesman Tariq Yasarevich following the visit of representatives of the organization to a destroyed institution in Gaza City on Monday.
Save the remaining hospitals
Only a third of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain operational, so it is critical to “preserve what’s left” of the enclave’s health system, Jasarevic said.
According to local authorities, more than 76 thousand residents of the enclave were injured. UN agencies have repeatedly warned that amputations and caesarean sections are carried out in Gaza without anesthesia.
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“We reiterate our call for the ‘deconfliction’ mechanism to be effective, transparent and workable,” the WHO spokesman said, referring to the system used by humanitarian organizations in coordination with conflict parties to avoid targeting aid convoys. Concerns about the current system persist after Israeli airstrikes killed seven staff members of the non-governmental organization World Central Kitchen on April 1.
Yet more than half of WHO missions planned in period from October last year to the end of March, “were either rejected, postponed, or encountered other obstacles,” Jasarevic noted. 62~
Shortages of staff and supplies are leaving “wounded children writhing in pain” in hospitals or makeshift shelters, said Tess Ingram of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Seven-year-old Omar receives medical treatment for malnutrition in Gaza.
“Imagine for a second that you are stripped naked, searched and interrogated for several hours, then told that the danger has passed and you leave. You run down the street, praying that everything will be okay. But then the shooting starts, your father is killed, and the bullet pierces your pelvis, causing severe internal and external injuries that require surgery. At the field hospital, Yunis told me this story. He is 14 years old,” Ingram said, speaking in Cairo after a visit to northern Gaza. She also noted that her convoy came under fire in the sector.
The UNICEF spokeswoman stressed how difficult the work remains to evacuate seriously injured or sick patients to care outside the enclave. Less than half of all medical evacuation requests were approved: only about 4,500 victims, most of them children, were able to leave Gaza – less than 20 people per day.
End crisis
Highlighting the plight of Gazans, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on Monday called on influential members of the international community to stop the “horrific humanitarian and human rights crisis” in sector.
“Israel continues to impose illegal restrictions on the delivery and distribution of humanitarian aid, as well as large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure,” Turk said, repeating calls for an immediate ceasefire and the release of all remaining hostages.
West Bank
The High Commissioner also expressed deep concern about the increase in violence in the West Bank and the “waves of attacks” in recent days against Palestinians “from hundreds of Israeli settlers, often accompanied or supported by Israeli security forces.”
After the killing of a 14-year-old boy from an Israeli settler family, four Palestinians, including a child, were killed and Palestinian property was destroyed in revenge attacks, it says Turk’s statement.
One of the families forced to leave a Palestinian settlement in the West Bank in October 2023.
Citing information received by his office, the UN’s chief human rights lawyer said armed settlers and Israeli forces had entered a number of localities, including al-Mugayer, the village of Beitin in Ramallah, Duma and Qusra in Nablus, and in Bethlehem and Hebron provinces. Dozens of Palestinians were reportedly injured in the violence that followed, and “hundreds of houses and other buildings, as well as cars, were burned,” Turk said. He stressed that “neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis should take justice into their own hands for the purpose of revenge.”
An unprecedented scale of military action
In Geneva, the head of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, Navi Pillay, said that potential military escalation between Israel and Iran raises serious concerns.
At a briefing for the Arab League days after Iran launched drone and missile attacks on Israel, Pillay highlighted the “unprecedented” scale of Israeli military action in Gaza.
To date, more than 33,200 people have been killed and 1.7 million Gazans have been forced from their homes, according to Gaza health authorities. The attacks also affected about 40 percent of all schools in the sector. exhaustion has become a reality for the residents of the enclave,” said the chairman of the commission. “The destruction of roads and infrastructure has seriously undermined the ability of humanitarian organizations to deliver aid to the population.”