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 traumatized by over 700 days of unrelenting conflict to flee one hellscape to end up in another,” she insisted.

150,000 go south in a month

According to the UN’s humanitarian affairs coordination office, OCHA, over the past few days, partners monitoring the movement of people in Gaza counted almost 70,000 displacements heading south, and about 150,000 over 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 described 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 with no shoes.

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.

Sea of despair

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

Child malnutrition in Gaza is “spiralling”, Ms. Ingram continued, pointing out that according to 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.

Feeding centres closed

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

While humanitarians remain on site and continue responding to the crisis, “it is becoming harder with every bombardment and every denial”, she stressed.

According to OCHA, last Sunday out of 17 missions that humanitarian teams coordinated with the Israeli authorities, only four were facilitated, while seven missions were denied and others were impeded on the ground or had to be cancelled.

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

More to follow…