Israel plan to seize more of Gaza means 'more children will suffer,' says UN

The UN warned on Friday that an Israeli plan to take control of 70 per cent of Gaza will increase suffering among children already hit by the impacts of severe overcrowding.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the military to take control of more territory in the Gaza Strip, flouting the terms of a fragile ceasefire that took effect in October.

He said the military had controlled 50 per cent of the Palestinian territory under the terms of the ceasefire, then advanced to take over 60 per cent.

"My directive is to move to... 70 per cent," he said.

The United Nations children's agency UNICEF warned that this would deepen the health crisis among children in the war-ravaged territory, suffering from acute lack of food, water and hygiene.

Israel controls the flow of aid into the territory along with all entry points into Gaza, which has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007.

Even before Hamas's October 7, 2023 attacks inside Israel triggered the war in Gaza, the territory was already very densely populated.

Now "people have been crammed into around 40 per cent of the space", UNICEF spokesman Salim Oweis told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Gaza.

People there were left "sheltering among broken buildings, rubble and mounting solid waste", he said, adding "there is no accessible space left to clear" the waste.

"The effects of this are now widely apparent: children with respiratory infections, acute watery diarrhoea, and more than half of all households reporting skin diseases."

"Fleas, lice and scabies are commonplace," Oweis said, also pointing to numerous cases of rats biting young children and even babies.

Oweis said a woman named Hind "hasn't slept since her four-year-old daughter, Masa, was bitten by a rat during the night".

"Like many families, they sheltered wherever they could, in their case, the second floor of a building block where sewage water leaks through the ceilings, and rodents crawl through the cracks in the building and climb the exposed pipes," he said.

Rats are not the only menace.

Oweis said he had spoken with another woman named Amani whose seven-year-old daughter had "developed deep lesions and sores on her head, back and legs due to a bacterial infection".

He warned that "increasing numbers of children are requiring hospitalisation, all without a single fully functioning hospital across Gaza."

The situation was "dire", Oweis said, noting the overcrowding was already "creating more spread of diseases, straining the systems and of course cutting... services".

If Israel takes control of even more land, he warned, that "means that we will lose access to some of the service points, but also (to) some hard to reach places (where) children and families are living".

"This will just mean that more children will suffer," he said

The Palestinian foreign ministry slammed Netanyahu's announcement as "a serious violation of the foundations of the ceasefire".

Since then, Gaza has been gripped by daily violence, with Israel killing more than 900 people there, according to Gaza's health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.

They are among the over 72,800 people killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the health ministry.

The October 7, 2023 attack that sparked the war meanwhile resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people on the Israeli side, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. 

Agence France-Presse