The World Health Organization warned – Tuesday – that the situation in Gaza is “close to being the darkest in human history,” while the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said that Gaza’s hospitals have become war zones and battlefields.
The representative of the World Health Organization in the occupied Palestinian territories, Richard Pepperkorn, said in a video interview from Rafah to journalists in Geneva that the number of people leaving the central and southern Gaza Strip is “increasing significantly.”
Pepperkorn added, “The situation is getting worse every hour. The bombing is intensifying everywhere, including here in the southern regions.” “Many people are desperate and in a constant state of shock,” he added.
He continued, “We are close to a situation that is the darkest in human history.”
He pointed out that “the bombing and unjustified loss of life must stop now, and we need a permanent ceasefire.”
The Israeli army expanded the scope of its ground operations to include the entire Gaza Strip, nearly two months after the start of the war, after it launched a ground attack on October 27 in the north of the besieged Strip.
The government media office in Gaza announced – Tuesday – that 16,248 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since the outbreak of the war between Israel and the Palestinian movement.
“I feel like I have no way to describe the horrors that happen to children here,” says James Elder, UNICEF spokesman
Children need to #Gaza To an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. pic.twitter.com/3n2eo2wVQL
– UNICEF (@UNICEFinArabic) December 4, 2023
War on children
For his part, UNICEF spokesman James Elder said, “This war on children has resumed with ferocity, on a scale that exceeds anything we have ever witnessed in the south, and on the level of everything we have witnessed in the north.”
Elder added, today, Tuesday, in statements published today, that Gaza’s hospitals have become war zones and battlefields. He stressed that there are very difficult conditions in providing aid inside Gaza, and the situation is now bleak and deadly.
He explained, “The intensity of the bombing hinders the provision of humanitarian aid inside Gaza, and there is a lack of clean water and food.”
He added, “People in Gaza need water, food, and medicine urgently.” Children in Gaza also come to hospitals with broken bones, shrapnel penetrating their bodies, and without food.
