Gaza: Two children killed every day during fragile ceasefire, says UNICEF

Despite an agreed ceasefire, UN agencies said on Friday.

“Yesterday morning, a baby girl was reportedly killed in Khan Younis by an airstrike, while the day before, seven children were killed in Gaza City and the south,” said Ricardo Pires, spokesperson for the UN Children’s Fund, UNICEF.

What to know

• UNICEF says 67 children have been killed during the ceasefire.
• 280 Palestinian deaths and 672 injuries reported since the pause began.
• Families face extreme food shortages despite some market activity.
• Gaza’s health system is collapsing, leaving children without care.
• About 4,000 children need urgent medical evacuation.

In an update, Mr. Pires told journalists: “There's only one party to the conflict in Gaza with the firepower to do airstrikes.”

Since 11 October, the first full day of the pause in hostilities between the Israeli military and Hamas fighters, at least 67 children have been killed in “conflict related incidents”, the UNICEF spokesperson noted.

His comments came as NGO Doctors Without Borders reported that a nine-year-old girl is receiving treatment for facial wounds after gunfire from quadcopter drones was reported on Wednesday.

Hundreds killed and injured

According to UNICEF, at least 67 children have been killed in “conflict-related incidents” since the Hamas-Israel pause in hostilities was announced on 10 October, at a rate of two a day.

Veteran UN aid worker Dr Rik Peeperkorn from the World Health Organization (WHO) echoed those concerns, adding that “although there's a ceasefire, people still get killed”.

Latest Gaza Ministry of Health data indicates that 280 Gazans have been killed and 672 injured since the ceasefire, in addition to 571 bodies recovered from the rubble.

Alongside the ongoing insecurity, UN aid teams including the World Food Programme (WFP) continue to push for greater access to Gazans, including hundreds of thousands of displaced and extremely vulnerable families.

Trucks entering, ‘step in the right direction’

The agency is now sending approximately 100 trucks per day into the enclave loaded with relief supplies, which is almost two-thirds of its daily target amount – “a step in the right direction” – said Abeer Etefa, WFP Senior Spokesperson for the Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe.

She noted that although deliveries from the commercial sector are also crossing into Gaza, the main problem for UN and non-UN actors “is the fact that a lot of these food supplies stay in border crossing points for long days and therefore you know the possibility of them going bad is high.”

From inside Gaza, WFP Head of Communications in Palestine Martin Penner described the dire situation confronting the enclave’s exhausted people, after more than two years of war.

“One woman told us that she feels like her whole body is crying out for different kinds of food, different from the canned food and the dry rations that people have been living on for two years,” he said.

Prices 'out of reach'

Markets are returning to Gaza stocked with food too, “but prices are still out of reach for most people,” Mr. Penner insisted. “A chicken costs $25, a kilo of meat $20. So many people still rely on food aid, food parcels, bread from bakeries.”

One mother told him that she did not take her children to market “so that they won't see all the food that's available…If they go near the market, she tells them to cover their eyes.

Another woman in the same town said she buys one apple and divides it between her four children.”

Meanwhile, healthcare provision in the Gaza Strip remains devastated and inadequate to treat trauma victims and those requiring specialist care.

“Gaza's doctors tell us of children they know how to save but cannot,” said UNICEF’s Mr. Pires, who reeled off a list to journalists of youngsters “with severe burns, shrapnel wounds, spinal injuries, traumatic brain injuries, children with cancer who have lost months of treatment. Premature babies who need intensive care. Children who need surgeries that simply cannot be done inside Gaza today.”

Around 4,000 children are still waiting to be evacuated, including two-year-old Omyma “whose heart is failing because of a congenital issue doctors in Gaza cannot treat. She needs surgery urgently to save her life,” Mr Pires noted.