Gaza City, once a final refuge for families in the northern Gaza Strip, is rapidly becoming a place where childhood can no longer survive, a senior UN official warned Thursday.
“It is a city of fear, flight and funerals,” said Tess Ingram, UNICEF Communication Manager for the Middle East and North Africa Regional Office, during a daily press briefing at UN headquarters in New York. She joined the briefing via video link from inside the Gaza Strip.
As the humanitarian crisis deepens, Ingram described the looming danger of an intensified military offensive in Gaza City, which still shelters nearly 1 million people.
“The world is sounding the alarm about what such an escalation could mean - a catastrophe for those who remain,” she said. “It would be an unthinkable tragedy, and we must do everything in our power to prevent it.”
Over nine days, Ingram met families who had already been displaced once and were now forced to flee again, arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
“I met children who were separated from their parents in the chaos. Mothers whose children have died of starvation. Mothers who fear their children will be next,” she said. “I’ve spoken to kids lying in hospital beds, their small bodies shredded by shrapnel.”
The humanitarian infrastructure is collapsing. According to Ingram, only 44 of the 92 UNICEF-supported outpatient nutrition centers in Gaza City remain operational. As a result, thousands of malnourished children have lost access to more than half of the life-saving treatment they depend on.
“UNICEF teams are doing everything they can to help,” she said. “But we could do far more - we could reach every child - if our operations were enabled at scale and if we had adequate funding.”
Ingram underscored that the suffering of children in Gaza is not incidental.
“Palestinian life is being dismantled here,” she said. “This is the direct consequence of choices that have turned Gaza City - and indeed the entire Strip - into a place where lives are under attack from every direction, every single day.”
She reiterated UNICEF’s urgent calls: for Israel to review its rules of engagement to ensure the protection of children, in line with international humanitarian law; for sufficient humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza; and for Hamas and other armed groups to release all remaining hostages.
Ingram also called on all parties to protect civilians and critical infrastructure, to reinstate the ceasefire, and on the international community to leverage its influence to end the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza.
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