The Gaza Strip is the "most dangerous place in the world to be a child," the head of the United Nations children's agency UNICEF said.
Unicef Executive Director Catherine Russell told the UN Security Council that "more than 5,300 Palestinian children have been reportedly killed in just 46 days, that is over 115 a day, every day, for weeks and weeks.
Based on these figures, children account for 40% of the deaths in Gaza. This is unprecedented. In other words, today, the Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child, Russell said.
"We are also receiving reports that more than 1,200 children remain under the rubble of bombed," she added.
Russell expressed her concern about the epidemiological dangers, the near absence of drinking water, especially for infants, and the effects of malnutrition.
Gaza's children are at extreme risk from catastrophic living conditions. One million children or really all children inside the territory are now food insecure; facing what could soon become a catastrophic nutrition crisis.
She said that Unicef calls for an urgent humanitarian ceasefire with the aim of putting an immediate end to this massacre.
For her part, Executive Director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Natalia Kanem expressed her concern about the fate of pregnant women in the Gaza Strip and their newborns. She said that amid the battles and destruction, there are currently 5,500 pregnant women expected to give birth in the coming months in Gaza. Every day, approximately 180 women deliver under appalling conditions, the future for their newborns uncertain, she said.
UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous said that before the current escalation, there were 650,000 women and girls in dire need of humanitarian assistance in Gaza. Now that estimate has gone up to 1.1 million, including the nearly 800,000 women internally displaced. She added that the world is looking to us to model its highest ideals, not to reflect its greatest failures.
The death toll as a result of the ongoing occupation aggression against the Gaza Strip since October 7th has risen to 14,532, including more than 6,000 children and 4,000 women, in addition to more than 35,000 wounded, and more than 7,000 missing.
