After more than four months of war, virtually all Palestinians in Gaza are now going hungry. It affects the children the hardest. – My children are starving, they wake up crying from hunger, a woman told the AFP news agency. – Where will I get food for them, she asks. There are no good answers to that. Some aid is getting into Gaza, but far from enough. Two children receive treatment for malnutrition at the Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital in Rafah, Gaza. Photo: Reuters A new report from the UN shows that 90 per cent of all children under the age of two experience severe food shortages. So do 95 percent of all pregnant women and mothers who are breastfeeding. Severe food shortages mean that at best they get two meals a day, and that the food they get has very little nutritional content, NTB writes. Too little emergency aid The UN investigation was carried out last month, and the situation is therefore even more dramatic today. It is particularly serious for breastfeeding infants and their mothers, warns the UN. Food shortage in Gaza 15.6 per cent, every sixth child under the age of two is now acutely malnourished in the north of the Gaza Strip. For many of them it means life. 90 per cent of all children under the age of two, and 95 per cent of all pregnant women and mothers who are breastfeeding, experience severe food shortages. 95 percent of all households in Gaza have to ration food. 64 percent of all households in Gaza say that they can now only eat one meal a day. In northern Gaza, where many do not receive emergency aid, 15.6 per cent of children under the age of two are acutely malnourished. In Rafah on the border with Egypt, 5 percent of children under the age of two are acutely malnourished. Source: NTB. The report was produced by the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Food Program (WFP) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, says countless children will die of malnutrition if the war continues. – Gaza is going to see an explosion of child deaths that could have been averted. It will come on top of the already unbearable number of dead children in the Palestinian territories, says UNICEF in a statement to Al Jazeera. According to the health authorities in Gaza, over 12,000 children have been killed in Israeli attacks since the war started on 7 October. Around 29,000 Palestinians have been killed. Around 1,200 Israelis were killed when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October last year. The northern part of the Gaza Strip has for a long time received little or no emergency aid. But also further south, where over 1.7 million people have fled, more and more people are starving.
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The UN sounds a hunger alarm in Gaza – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
