{"id":21545,"date":"2025-07-12T06:58:06","date_gmt":"2025-07-12T06:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=21545"},"modified":"2025-07-12T06:58:09","modified_gmt":"2025-07-12T06:58:09","slug":"the-war-on-gazas-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=21545","title":{"rendered":"The War on Gaza\u2019s Children"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Without safe access to food, water, or medical care, survival has become a daily gamble for the region\u2019s youngest residents.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

he humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip continues to worsen, particularly for children. Last month, UNICEF<\/em> declared that the number of children being admitted to hospitals in Gaza for acute malnutrition had risen by fifty per cent between April and May. \u201cOf the 5,119 children admitted in May, 636 children have severe acute malnutrition (SAM), the most lethal form of malnutrition,\u201d the statement explained. \u201cThese children need consistent, supervised treatment, safe water, and medical care to survive\u2014all of which are increasingly scarce in Gaza today. The number of children with SAM has surged 146 per cent since February.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas earlier this year led Israel to permit more aid to enter Gaza, but, since then, Israel has either cut off all aid or allowed in just a trickle. Moreover, Israel has largely replaced the previous aid-delivery system, which operated in part through the United Nations, with a new system<\/a>, run by a private organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in which Palestinians are forced to trek to one of four locations to receive food. Israeli forces, and private American contractors who are guarding the sites, have fired weapons at Palestinians as they approach; more than six hundred Palestinians have been killed while collecting aid, according to the United Nations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I recently spoke by phone with James Elder, UNICEF<\/em>\u2019s global spokesperson, who just returned from the Strip. Elder has previously worked in countries including Angola, Zimbabwe, Libya, and Sri Lanka. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the wounded children he spoke to in Gaza, the risks people are now willing to take in order to find food, and how parents are trying to cope with unimaginable loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When were you last in Gaza?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I was last in Gaza in June, and I was there for two weeks. It was my fifth mission to Gaza since the horrors of October 7th. In a typical emergency, my job is to go and see the situation, report on it, and share what UNICEF<\/em> is doing. But, in Gaza, ninety-five per cent of it is to bear witness. I spend entire days in hospitals and camps simply listening to people and hearing the situation. I learned very early on in November or December of 2023 that it was much more important to spend my time sharing the grave violations that are occurring consistently to children rather than speaking about what our program is doing. In terms of what\u2019s happening, there has been a great degree of disinformation and a great degree of credibility given to statements that have been found to be completely false. So it\u2019s been very important, I think, to simply bear witness, and I have met hundreds of children and families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How would you say your visit in June was different from your previous visits, if it was different?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yes, it was, even though I didn\u2019t expect it to be. It was different for several reasons. One is the wounds I saw on children. There were burns on little girls and boys, fourth-degree burns I didn\u2019t know existed. And shrapnel riddled through a body. Shrapnel is designed to go through cement, and what it does to a child\u2019s body is horrific. On one previous trip, I saw a bus of children who spent two days trying to get from the north to the south after being held at Israeli checkpoints, and I walked in the bus, and all I could smell was children\u2019s burning flesh. It doesn\u2019t leave you. And one of the things that struck me this time was that I wasn\u2019t just seeing these children\u2014I was hearing them. There is such a horrendous lack of painkillers that when I\u2019d be in a hospital\u2014and hospitals are wall to wall with people with wounds of war\u2014you\u2019d hear the children and their screams. So I certainly noticed that as a person, parent, human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The other thing was food and water. Whenever you have warnings of famine, there is big international pressure, and Israel loosens controls so more aid can come in. But then international pressure wanes and the restrictions are tightened again. Once you have famine, people are dying en masse. But there is starvation where a child\u2019s body is degrading and the immune system is starting to collapse, and that\u2019s happening\u2014so children\u2019s bodies aren\u2019t waiting for that technical definition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are now so far below the emergency threshold for water. It is in critical shortage now, and it is controlled entirely by Israel. Since electricity to Gaza was cut after the horrors of October 7th, diesel became essential to treat and distribute water, but there\u2019s been a hundred-plus-day blockade on fuel coming into Gaza. We\u2019ve got to a point where, if that doesn\u2019t change or if the electricity isn\u2019t turned back on, which would solve a lot of problems, you\u2019ll start to see children dying of thirst. Water was something that really, really struck me, because it\u2019s absolutely political, not logistical. If Israel allowed fuel or turned on the power for these desalination plants, that problem would be solved. That\u2019s a level of stress on a population I saw that I hadn\u2019t seen before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most lethal crisis isn\u2019t just hunger or thirst\u2014it\u2019s the brutal collision of both. And those deaths are often not recorded; when children are severely malnourished, they\u2019re eleven times more likely to die from common childhood illnesses. They\u2019re often not getting to a hospital\u2014first because the hospitals are full of people with wounds of war, and, second, if you just look at the south, there is one fully functioning hospital, and it\u2019s in an evacuation zone. It\u2019s almost impossible to get to unless you\u2019re in an ambulance, because you have to walk through an evacuation zone, which is militarized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What have you learned about children starving to death?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Starving to death is dying of severe acute malnutrition, and there is a number, but, honestly, I\u2019m not sure how reliable it is. [The director of Gaza\u2019s field hospitals told NBC News last month that more than sixty-six children had died from hunger and malnutrition since the war began.<\/em>] The problem is that, for the vast majority of children, if you die, if you are severely, acutely malnourished and you die, it\u2019s very unusual to have \u201cstarved to death.\u201d You\u2019ve died because of diarrhea, basically, or acute watery diarrhea, which is very, very commonplace now, particularly given the restrictions on water and food. You\u2019re killed by something that a healthy child\u2019s immune system wards off very, very easily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are your conversations like with these kids\u2019s parents? Is there anger? Sadness? How would you characterize it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I would say that anger is infrequent. There\u2019s an immense vulnerability. And they\u2019re holding their medical-evacuation forms, meaning that they were approved for medical evacuation from Gaza. But there are thousands of children who need medical evacuation from Gaza. I mean, literally thousands. So they\u2019re holding this piece of false hope in their hands. There\u2019s a grace and generosity in speaking to me, but there\u2019s an absolute sadness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a level of powerlessness that I\u2019ve noticed for a long time. I noticed it more than a year ago when a parent would explain to me that their child had realized that this parent could no longer protect them, and what a horrifying moment that was. These parents know that they\u2019ve lost the ability to keep their children safe, so that powerlessness cuts deep into people. You sit and you listen and you talk, and it\u2019s a little girl or a little boy, and they are trying to be brave in some way, or they\u2019re in a coma and the parent\u2019s trying to. And in doing so, the parents, sometimes fathers in a very paternalistic environment, are in tears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One woman sort of grabbed me when I was walking out of the hospital and wanted to tell her story, and the look in her eyes was just definitive despair. She wanted nothing. She just needed to tell her story. She had spent nine years conceiving, and her son and her husband had just been killed. And so she didn\u2019t know what she wanted. There is nothing to do in those situations. Culturally, you can\u2019t hug someone, so there is nothing other than to listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many times, people are explaining what had happened to a child, and I realize that\u2019s not the parent because the parents were killed in a strike. I\u2019m having this explained by a neighbor or an aunt or an uncle. I\u2019ve met more than a dozen children who lost everyone. I don\u2019t mean mom and dad\u2014I mean cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What stories have you heard of people trying to approach these new aid sites? What decisions are people making about whether to even try to approach them given the amount of violence going on?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was one of my main focusses, if not the focus. I deliberately did seek out people at first, and then I realized I didn\u2019t have to seek them out. Everyone had a story. But, initially, I did, because in the very early days it was clear to the United Nations why this couldn\u2019t work. When I went in, the aid sites had only just started and already we were getting reports of mass-casualty events, of all the things we feared. If people are going from A to B, and A is starvation and desperation, and B is where the food is, but it\u2019s a militarized zone, then there can be a justification for people to be shot\u2014because it is a militarized zone. It\u2019s ludicrous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There was a little boy named Abed Al Rahman. He was thirteen, and he had been given money by his dad to go and buy bread. He had gone out to the streets and seen people starting to move. There was real chaos and misinformation. People were not sure what was open or closed. And he wasn\u2019t finding bread, so he just followed people [to a G.H.F. distribution site]. He said he was corralled into a sort of caged area and was only there for an hour or two, but then, before he got anywhere near aid, there was shooting in the sky, from what he called quadcopters. He ran, and a tank shell was fired. And what he had through his body, particularly his stomach and pancreas, was shrapnel from a tank shell. Now, that, to me, was incredibly important, because only one party to the conflict has tanks. So this little guy was extraordinary. He sat up. His parents wanted to do a video. He had a medical-evacuation form, and he was screaming in pain. His elder brother every now and then tried to adjust his legs, trying to do anything to alleviate the pain. That was the first child I met. On the day I left Gaza, that little boy died. He died of those wounds. He died because he didn\u2019t have the medical equipment in the hospital and wasn\u2019t evacuated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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At one point, I met three young guys, all brothers who\u2019d been to a site seven times and had never received aid. They explained very, very clearly that they would go down into the aid areas, and then chaos would break loose. Families would always have discussions on this. I met at least half a dozen families who would have quite democratic discussions. And it was always a young guy who wanted to go, and his family was saying, \u201cNo, no, you will be killed.\u201d Some of them would sneak out at night. I did meet one guy who had been successful. It took him thirty-six hours to get home because he thought he would get mugged with the supplies that he had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This thirteen-year-old kid had originally set out to get the bread elsewhere, though? Is that what you meant?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah. So, a market still exists. I could see tomatoes. The tomatoes would cost fifteen to twenty times what they\u2019d cost in New York City. And, of course, people haven\u2019t earned an income in forever, and there\u2019s a shortage of cash, so it\u2019s not available to ninety per cent of the population. But this boy took it upon himself. He had money to buy bread and ignored his dad\u2019s instructions because, \u201cI\u2019m going to come home with a box of food.\u201d And it was horrific, because he was telling the story. It was being translated to me, of course. And there was his dad in tears. He\u2019s listening to his son explain, \u201cI just wanted to help my family.\u201d And now he\u2019s looking at his son. He\u2019s looking at his son twelve days away from being dead. And he is just breaking into tears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I had one guy whose English was good say to me that he went to a site and waited, and a drone came overhead and shot a few people nearby him, and he could see them. He said, \u201cI see people bleeding, see people dead . . . but we did everything we were told. Why did they do that?\u201d Now, it\u2019s not my position to say why. People have given me an answer, which is that they did it because they can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also met a twenty-three-year-old woman who went to an aid site. She had bad rips from the barbed wire in her leg and her chest because she got pushed into it somehow in the early days, very early days of when they opened, and she got nothing. But she\u2019s the oldest in her family, and her father has a heart condition. I said, \u201cBut you\u2019ll go back again?\u201d She said, \u201cYes, just please don\u2019t let me die of an empty stomach.\u201d And people are genuinely taking many, many more risks now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did you get into Gaza, and where did you stay, and how long were you there?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, so, you go into Amman, Jordan, and then it\u2019s an early-morning bus that goes across the King Hussein Bridge. You go into Israel and then go on a bus through one of the crossings into Gaza. And there you go through more security checks, and you are met on the other side, in my case, by my agency and an armored vehicle. And then you go in a convoy. Now you\u2019re in Gaza. The only control there is the I.D.F. You\u2019re told the road is safe and that they won\u2019t strike. And then you start the drive through Gaza, which is always pretty harrowing. You go initially through wasteland, and then it\u2019s quite apocalyptic\u2014three hundred and sixty degrees of just devastation. On and on and on and on it goes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, suddenly, there are dots in the distance, and then there\u2019s a thousand people all around the vehicles doing that universal symbol of hand to mouth. I\u2019ve had kids lift their shirts in tears, tapping on the window, showing their ribs. Once they see U.N. vehicles, they\u2019re hoping there\u2019s a convoy behind it. But, strikingly, we were never threatened. Kids might jump on your vehicle. I\u2019ve always thought, At what point does this society just fall apart?<\/em> But, no, there\u2019s always someone there to push people away and let you go through. Still, it can take hours and hours. It takes twelve to fifteen hours to go a couple hundred miles if you start from Jordan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s indulgent to talk about yourself. But it would also be completely na\u00efve to say we feel safe. It\u2019s very clear. Everyone has learned in Gaza that aid workers, journalists, certainly children are never safe. And there\u2019s a guilt to that at night. There\u2019s guilt when I put a pillow over my head at 1:00 A.M.<\/em>, and I finally need to sleep, and I\u2019m trying to drown out the bombardments, which are relentless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What did you eat?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the mornings you\u2019ll get a bit of porridge, and then you don\u2019t eat during the day, and then in the evening there\u2019s a cook\u2014whatever he\u2019s found, basically. It can be pretty simple. It might be a lentil soup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is talk that there might be another ceasefire soon, but nothing you have said makes me think that these wounds won\u2019t last a very long time.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wasn\u2019t there during the ceasefire, but people talked about it and I thought they were teasing me at first. They talk about how, on Day One of the ceasefire, they were going to caf\u00e9s. So the ability to bounce back is there. Now, having said that, we are in uncharted territory when it comes to trauma. There\u2019s nowhere else in the world where UNICEF<\/em> has ever said that every single child needs mental-health support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We do a lot of trauma work in Gaza, and the professionals there remind me that you don\u2019t call it P.T.S.D. in Gaza because there\u2019s nothing post<\/em>\u2014there\u2019s always new traumas coming. They give children skills to deal with nightmares at night. A little girl would explain how she\u2019d pretend she was in her grandfather\u2019s garden and try to smell the basil to help her with nightmares. But as the child psychologist would say, they\u2019re not just nightmares. They\u2019re also a reality. Sometimes it\u2019s a memory of fleeing your home at two in the morning and seeing your mom get shot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I was also really conscious of the ninety-eight-per-cent literacy rate there. People say the primary thing is to get kids in school, more often than anyplace I have ever been. That\u2019s a real fear. Now you\u2019ve got the utter devastation of an education system of children. A little girl said to me, \u201cLook at me. I used to be beautiful, but now all I do all day is chase water trucks around.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference Link:- https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/q-and-a\/the-war-on-gazas-children<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Without safe access to food, water, or medical care, survival has become a daily gamble for the region\u2019s youngest residents. he humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip continues to worsen, particularly for children. Last month, UNICEF declared that the number of children being admitted to hospitals in Gaza for acute malnutrition had risen by fifty per cent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21546,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[10013,18853,893,1115,105,52,51,1240,21175,972],"class_list":["post-21545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sample-category","tag-children","tag-famine","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-geopolitics-2","tag-israel","tag-palestine","tag-starvation","tag-the-war-on-gazas-children","tag-west-bank"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21559,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21545\/revisions\/21559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}