Gaza City has become 'city of fear, flight and funerals': UN official

United Nations, Sep 5 (IANS) Gaza City, the last refuge for families in the northern Gaza Strip, is fast becoming a place where childhood cannot survive, Tess Ingram, UNICEF Communication Manager for the Middle East and North Africa Regional Office, said.

"It is a city of fear, flight and funerals," Ingram told a daily briefing on Thursday at the UN headquarters in New York, via video conferencing from the Gaza Strip.

The world is sounding the alarm about what an intensified military offensive in Gaza City could bring -- a catastrophe for the nearly 1 million people who remain there, she said.

"It would be an unthinkable tragedy, and we must do everything in our power to prevent it," Ingram added.

She said that over nine days, she met families in Gaza City who fled their homes in fear -- already displaced, now displaced again -- arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs, Xinhua news agency reported.

"I met children who were separated from their parents in that chaos. Mothers whose children have died of starvation. Mothers who fear their children will be next. I've spoken to kids in hospital beds, their small bodies shredded by shrapnel," she added.

According to Ingram, only 44 of the 92 UNICEF-supported outpatient nutrition treatment centres in Gaza City are still functioning, depleting thousands of malnourished children of more than half of the lifelines they depend on to fight famine.

"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.

"Palestinian life is being dismantled here", and the suffering of children in the Gaza Strip is not accidental, Ingram stressed.

"It is the direct consequence of choices that have turned Gaza City and indeed the entire Strip into a place where people's lives are under attack, from every angle, every day."

Ingram said that UNICEF continues to call on Israel to review its rules of engagement to ensure children are protected, as is required under international humanitarian law, and to allow sufficient aid to enter Gaza; on Hamas and other armed groups to release all the remaining hostages; on both parties to protect civilians and essential infrastructure, and to reinstate the ceasefire; and on the international community to use their leverage to end the current catastrophic situation in Gaza.

--IANS

int/khz