The United Nations children’s agency (UNICEF) has drawn attention to the number of child casualties in Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, saying thousands of kids remain buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings in the Palestinian territory.
UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Ted Chaiban made the remarks on Wednesday during a UN Security Council meeting on children and armed conflict.
He said that Palestinian children continue to endure “incomprehensible suffering,” particularly those in the Gaza Strip amid a “staggering” scale of death and destruction there.
Chaiban noted that more than 23,000 cases of children killed or maimed in 2023 have yet to be verified due to insecurity, movement restrictions and significant risks to humanitarian personnel operating in Gaza.
“The bodies of thousands of missing children remain buried under rubble, and none of this includes the thousands of violations reported so far in 2024,” he added.
The UNICEF official also highlighted the obstacles that are impeding aid deliveries to Gaza and thus increasing the number of acutely malnourished children, noting “After nearly nine months of horrible conflict, UNICEF and other humanitarian actors are still struggling to reach those in need.”
He further called for “a complete ceasefire” in Gaza, where many children are losing their lives due to Israel’s starvation imposed on the besieged territory.
Israel unleashed its brutal Gaza onslaught on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out its historic operation against the occupying entity in retaliation for the regime’s intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
So far, the Tel Aviv regime has killed more than 37,718 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured over 86,377 others in Gaza.
Also speaking at the Security Council meeting was Palestine’s UN Ambassador Riyad Mansour who recalled that Israel has killed more children in recent months than in all armed conflict globally over the past 4 years.
He estimated that nearly 16,000 Palestinian children were killed in Israel’s aggression against Gaza while another 21,000 are missing.
The Gaza Strip, once a vibrant place where children set world records in sports, has now been reduced to a graveyard, Mansour said, calling for “collective resolve and responsibility to pressure Israel to stop the madness.”
‘Most of patients were children’
Meanwhile, Adam Hamawy, a former US Army combat surgeon who returned from a medical mission to Gaza, said that children made up most of his patients.
“The level of civilian casualties that I experienced was beyond anything I’d seen before,” the 54-year-old medic told AFP.
“Most of our patients were children under the age of 14.”
Hamawy also said that humanitarian aid must enter Gaza in “sufficient volumes to meet the demands”.
