UNRWA: The lives of Gaza’s children are marked by war and destruction

In an official statement, UNRWA said that “children constitute half of Gaza’s 2.4 million residents. Their lives are marked by war and destruction.”

The agency explained that children are spending their days out of school, forced into repeated displacement, and barely finding anything to eat.

“There are one million children in Gaza,” the statement emphasized.

UNRWA stressed the urgent need for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, for the sake of the children and a better future for the region.

According to human rights reports, children and women remain the most affected groups in the ongoing war, which has destroyed nearly every aspect of life and its basic infrastructure in Gaza.

For the second consecutive year, children have been denied access to classrooms, as most schools have been destroyed by Israeli forces. The remaining few have been converted into overcrowded shelters for forcibly displaced families.

Children in Gaza are living a harrowing reality, enduring hunger and thirst due to Zionist regime’s policy of systematically destroying food and water sources and sealing off border crossings.

At the end of June, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus revealed in a press statement that around 112 Palestinian children have been hospitalized daily in Gaza for malnutrition since the start of the year as a result of the ongoing Zionist regime’s blockade.

Since March 2, Zionist regime has tightly sealed all crossings into Gaza, blocking vital aid and supply trucks. Only a small number of trucks are allowed in, far below what is needed. Gaza requires a minimum of 500 aid trucks per day, but as of late 2024, only about 50 trucks were being allowed daily, according to government and field sources. UN reports at the time said this barely represented “a drop in the ocean” of the population’s needs.

Since October 7, 2023, with full US support, Zionist regime has waged a genocidal war on Gaza, one that includes killing, starvation, mass destruction, and forced displacement. These actions have continued despite mounting international calls for a ceasefire and a binding order from the International Court of Justice to stop the assault.

To date, the genocide has resulted in over 194,000 Palestinian casualties, dead and injured, most of them women and children, in addition to more than 11,000 missing and hundreds of thousands displaced. The blockade-induced famine has also claimed the lives of many, including dozens of children.