On the morning of May 15, Miran Mohammad was helping her grandfather bake bread at his home in Beit Lahia, a town in northern Gaza. Given the scarcity of food, the 7-year-old Miran was hungry and was eager to have a piece of the freshly baked bread. She wouldn’t get the chance.
Miran’s mother insisted she wait to eat until the family returned to their home. As they entered their house, it was hit in an airstrike, collapsing on top of them and causing them both serious injuries.
Miran is now a patient at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital; doctors tell us her legs permanently damaged. She is one of the more than 3,700 children under 18 years old in Gaza reported to have reportedly been wounded since the end of the recent cease-fire. Over 1,300 other children are reported to have been killed in hostilities during the same period. Through nearly 20 months of war, nearly 17,000 children have been reported killed and more than 34,000 have been wounded — around one in every 20 children in Gaza — making it the deadliest conflict for children in recent memory.
With the threat of famine growing by the day, the plight of Gaza’s children will surely worsen. According to the latest analysis from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a tool used by UNICEF and its partners to assess food security and malnutrition, the entire population of Gaza now faces acute food insecurity. Nearly half a million people are teetering on the edge of starvation. We estimate that over 71,000 children and 17,000 mothers will suffer from acute malnutrition, characterized by rapid weight loss and low weight-to-height ratio, in the next 10 months without sufficient humanitarian aid and treatment.
UNICEF and its partners are doing everything possible to respond. Yet because of Israel’s two-month-long blockade of aid, now unevenly lifted, we have extremely limited stocks in Gaza. Unless we regain safe, sustained access to Gaza and are allowed to scale up, more children will suffer.
On Tuesday, the world watched as thousands of hungry Palestinians in Rafah rushed to get food from a new aid delivery system backed by Israel that bypasses the United Nations as the main aid supplier in the territory. As the chaotic scenes made clear, rather than increasing access to lifesaving supplies, the new aid distribution plan, facilitated by an organization called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, threatens to make things worse.
Before hostilities resumed, the United Nations operated a vast and effective aid delivery system inside Gaza. During the recent cease-fire, we were delivering assistance like essential vaccines and medicine, lifesaving nutrition services and access to clean water through more than 400 distribution points, including in sites close to shelters for displaced families. UNICEF and our partners went even further, delivering aid door-to-door, reaching malnourished children and pregnant women directly in their places of refuge.
That extensive system is now sidelined, and our operations have been significantly curtailed. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is reportedly channeling aid through a few distribution points in southern Gaza that have security on site provided by private American contractors, and Israeli soldiers standing outside the perimeter. Having a limited number of distribution sites will force civilians to travel far from their homes, exposing them to violence.
According to Israeli authorities, these aid distribution sites are being supplied by 60 trucks a day — a tenth of the number going into Gaza during the recent cease-fire — and dole out “family boxes,” food aid meant to meet minimum survival needs. But our team on the ground report these boxes are woefully insufficient for ensuring children’s well-being. This plan cannot support a population of 2.1 million people, including over a million children.
We believe this new mechanism is also incompatible with humanitarian principles, including neutrality, impartiality and independence, and fails to meet Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law. That law requires parties to a conflict to allow and facilitate rapid, safe and unimpeded passage of humanitarian assistance.
Further, because the new system includes the presence of security at the distribution sites, there have been concerns that these locations could be perceived as military objectives. This could place humanitarian personnel and civilians seeking assistance at those sites at risk of attacks.
Israel has defended the new distribution effort as a way to prevent Hamas from stealing supplies. But the United Nations and its partners already know how to get humanitarian aid inspected, cleared, offloaded and delivered — without diversion, without delay and with dignity.
Our aid can be tracked from point of registration to point of delivery. Together with our partners, we accompany our supplies to the end. Our food reaches the malnourished child. Our vaccines go into a child’s arm. And we are transparent about the sources of funding for our aid programs.
What we need is for UNICEF and its humanitarian partners to be allowed to do our jobs. We have proven that essentials like medicine, vaccines, water, food and nutrition for babies can reach those in distress, wherever they are, when we have unfettered and safe access.
We are not asking for the impossible. We are asking for international humanitarian law to be respected and applied; for a return to the functioning U.N.-led aid pipeline with safe and sustained humanitarian access through all available crossings; for the return of all remaining hostages; and for Hamas and Israel to agree to a durable cease-fire.
If these steps are taken, we can begin to light a path out of the darkness of war for Miran and all the other children in Gaza and Israel affected by this war. I urge all parties and those with influence over them to let us and our humanitarian partners get on with our work. The alternative risks the militarization of humanitarian aid and would likely doom Gaza’s children to more suffering and death.
Catherine Russell is the executive director of UNICEF and was an ambassador at large for global women’s issues at the State Department in the Obama administration.
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