UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell has described Rafah as “a city of children who have nowhere safe to go”.
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has warned this Monday of the “catastrophic risks” faced by some 600,000 boys and girls in the town of Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, in the face of the assault. on a large scale that the Israeli Army is already completing, shortly after the first evacuations in this area were ordered.
Before the war, about 250,000 people lived in Rafah, but the UN estimates that 1.2 million are now crowded into this town, mostly arriving from other areas of the Strip. The overcrowding is such that there are about 20,000 people per square kilometer, a density that practically doubles that of New York.
UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell has described Rafah as “a city of children who have nowhere safe to go”.
“If large-scale military operations begin, children will not only be in danger from violence, but also from chaos and panic, and at a time when their physical and mental state is already weakened,” he said. lamented in a statement.
“Hundreds of thousands of boys and girls who are now overcrowded in Rafah are injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized or living with disabilities,” stressed Russell, who has called for “protection” and basic facilities and services for Palestinian children.
The UN already estimates that almost 8,000 children under two years of age suffer from acute malnutrition in Rafah, while some 175,000 children under five years of age, nine out of ten, suffer from at least one infectious disease.
Large scale offensive
For his part, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Jan Egeland, fears that the large-scale offensive on Rafah represents “the deadliest phase” of a conflict that has already claimed more than 34,000 lives. According to the latest from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 14,000 of these victims would be children, recalls Unicef.
Egeland has stressed that those affected have no “guarantees of safety, refuge or return”, which for the head of the NRC would amount to forced displacement.
“Any Israeli military operation on Rafah, which has become the largest accumulation of displaced persons camps in the world, can lead to mass atrocities,” Egeland added.
Source: Eitb
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