The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday that in the two years since the outbreak of the Israel-Palestine conflict, some 61,000 children have reportedly been killed or maimed.
Speaking at a press briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires said that, on average, one child has been killed or injured every 17 minutes, describing the figure as “unacceptable” and “staggering.”
Pires deplored the facts that children have been “suffering in their bodies and their minds for way too long,” remaining traumatized and “exposed to horrors that no child should ever have to look at or live.”
He noted that in Gaza, one in every five children is born prematurely, but the territory lacks the necessary infrastructure to ensure their survival, with reports that children are forced to share oxygen masks to stay alive.
UNICEF also noted that its teams in Gaza are still waiting for a green light to fetch incubators and ventilators for premature babies evacuated from the north of the Strip.
“We’ve managed to move the babies to another facility when the hospital they were in needed to be evacuated, but we haven’t managed to move the incubators… it’s been denied so far,” said Pires.
