UNITED NATIONS - Palestinian children and disabled people are facing ever more horrific conditions in war-torn Gaza, with some dying as they wait for medical evacuations, as the year-long Israeli war in the enclave grinds on, UN officials and rights experts said Friday. UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said the darkest moment of the Gaza conflict is unfolding in the north of the Strip, where the Israeli military is effectively subjecting an entire population to bombing, siege and risk of starvation, as well as being forced to choose between mass displacement and being trapped in an active conflict zone. “The bombing in north Gaza is non-stop,” Turk said Friday. “The Israeli military has ordered hundreds of thousands to move, with no guarantees of return. But, there is no safe way to leave. The bombs continue to fall, the Israeli military is separating families and detaining many people and people fleeing have been reportedly shot at.”
Calling on world’s leaders to act, the UN rights chief said States have a duty under the Geneva Conventions to ensure respect for international humanitarian law. “Unimaginably, the situation is getting worse by the day,” he stressed.
“The Israeli Government’s policies and practices in northern Gaza risk emptying the area of all Palestinians. We are facing what could amount to atrocity crimes, including potentially extending to crimes against humanity.”
At the same time, children are being medically evacuated from across Gaza at a rate of fewer than one child per day, with many suffering from such serious conditions as head trauma, amputations, burns, cancer and severe malnutrition, James Elder, spokesperson for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), told reporters in Geneva on Friday morning.
“This is not a logistical problem,” he said. “We have the ability to safely transport these children out of Gaza. It is not a capacity problem. Indeed, we were evacuating children at higher numbers just months ago. It is simply a problem that is being completely disregarded.”
As the year-long war grinds on, children are being medically evacuated from Gaza at a rate of fewer than one child per day, with many suffering from such serious conditions as head trauma, amputations, burns, cancer and severe malnutrition.
Trapped in the grip of an indifferent bureaucracy, children’s pain is brutally compounded, he said, adding that when a patient is denied an evacuation, there is nothing that can be done.
If this lethally slow pace continues, it would take more than seven years to evacuate the 2,500 children needing urgent medical care, Mr. Elder warned, adding that COGAT, the acronym for the Israeli authorities responsible for humanitarian affairs in the occupied Gaza Strip, “does not provide reasons for refusals”.