GENEVA, October 3, 2025 (WAFA) – The UN Agency for Children (UNICEF) affirmed on Friday that there was no safe place in the Gaza Strip.

Speaking at a press briefing in Geneva, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said: “The question I am asked everywhere in Gaza City - from women, from the elderly, and from children - is: ‘Where can I go that will be safe’?”.

“And the answer remains the same after almost two years: Nowhere. Nowhere is safe in the Gaza Strip,” he added.

Expressing concern about the situation, particularly for mothers and newborns in Gaza city, he said: “Shoeless children push grandparents in wheelchairs around rubble. Amputee children struggle through the dust. Mothers carry children whose skin is bleeding from rashes. Children shudder at the relentless airstrikes. And children gaze skyward tracking the fire from helicopters and quadcopters.”

Refuting Israel’s claims on the so-called ‘safe zones’, he said: “The south—the so-called “safe zones”—are also places of death. Al-Mawasi, now one of the most densely populated places on earth, is grotesquely overcrowded and stripped of the essentials of survival.”

“Indeed, the very notion of ‘safe zones’ in the south is farcical — bombs are dropped from the sky with chilling predictability. Schools designated as temporary shelters are regularly reduced to rubble. Tents pitched in empty lots offer no protection from shrapnel. They are frequently engulfed in fire from air attacks,” he added.

Highlighting that the so-called ‘save zones’ caused miscarriages, he said: “Women are having miscarriages on the exhausting trek from the north to the south. Doctors fear winter viruses have arrived early. Reports state that 1,000 babies have been killed in the past two years, and we have no idea how many more have died due to preventable illnesses.”

In addition to the more than 400,000 people forced to flee south, he said that another 200,000 civilians have been warned to leave Gaza City.

K.F.