Starving Gazans Face ‘Inhumane’ Mass Evacuation

A displaced family sit in front of their tent in Gaza.

As bombs continue to fall on Gaza City during Israel’s intensifying military operation, families with starving children are being pushed southwards from one “hellscape” to another, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said on Tuesday.

The development followed reports that the Israeli military has stepped up its ground offensive in Gaza City, ordering residents to leave the area.

Speaking from the south of the enclave, UNICEF’s Tess Ingram described the forced mass displacement of families as a “deadly threat for the most vulnerable.”

“It is inhumane to expect nearly half a million children, battered and traumatised by over 700 days of unrelenting conflict, to flee one hellscape only to end up in another,” she insisted.

According to the UN’s humanitarian affairs coordination office (OCHA), nearly 70,000 people have been displaced southwards in recent days, and around 150,000 in the past month. The only available route, Al Rashid Road, was “very busy” when Ms. Ingram was there on Monday, she said.

The UNICEF spokesperson recalled meeting a mother who had walked for more than six hours from Gaza City to the south with her five children, “all dirty, thirsty and starving,” two of them barefoot.

They are being pushed along with tens of thousands of others to “a so-called humanitarian zone” encompassing Al-Mawasi and surrounding areas, she said.

Ms. Ingram described their destination as “a sea of makeshift tents, human despair” with insufficient services to support the hundreds of thousands already living there.

Child malnutrition in Gaza is “spiralling,” she continued, noting that UNICEF estimates some 26,000 children in the enclave currently require treatment for acute malnutrition – more than 10,000 in Gaza City alone.

Famine was confirmed late last month in Gaza City by UN-backed food insecurity experts.

Ms. Ingram said that evacuation orders and military escalation have forced more nutrition centres in Gaza City to shut this week, “cutting off children from a third of the remaining treatment sites that can save their lives.”

While humanitarian staff remain on site and continue responding, “it is becoming harder with every bombardment and every denial,” she stressed.

According to OCHA, last Sunday only four out of 17 missions coordinated with Israeli authorities were facilitated, while seven were denied and the rest impeded or cancelled.

Ms. Ingram spoke of the impossible choices facing desperate Gazans: “stay in danger or flee to a place that they also know is dangerous.” She recalled that Al-Mawasi came under attack two weeks ago, when eight children were killed while lining up for water; the youngest victim was three years old.