GENEVA, September 5, 2025 (WAFA) – The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has urged the international community to do everything possible to prevent catastrophe in Gaza City as Israel ramps up military attacks ahead of a planned full takeover.
Tess Ingram, Communication Manager for UNICEF’s Middle East and North Africa Regional Office, recently spent nine days there, describing it as “a city of fear, flight and funerals.”
“The last refuge for families in the northern Gaza Strip is fast becoming a place where childhood cannot survive,” she said, speaking from the enclave to journalists in New York.
Only 44 out of 92 UNICEF-supported outpatient nutrition treatment centres are still functional, which means thousands of malnourished children lack access to these critical lifelines.
“The 40 incubators between them are running at up to 200 per cent capacity, meaning there are as many as 80 babies fighting for life in overcrowded machines, utterly dependent on generators and medical supplies that may run dry at any moment,” she said.
In Gaza City, Ingram met displaced families on the run once again, children who have been separated from their parents, and mothers whose children either died from starvation or who fear their offspring will be next.
“I’ve spoken to kids in hospital beds, their small bodies shredded by shrapnel,” she said. “The unthinkable is not looming. It is already here. The escalation is underway.”
Ingram said children in Gaza “are returning to emergency wards or relapsing just weeks after finishing treatment for malnutrition because of the ongoing lack of food, safe water and other essential supplies” in the Gaza Strip.
She affirmed that “without immediate and increased access to food and nutrition treatments, this recurring nightmare will deepen and more children will starve – a fate that is entirely preventable.”
“Our team is doing everything in their power to help children, but we could do far more, reach every child here, if our operations on the ground were enabled at scale and we were well funded,” she said.
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