Isabel Webster says what you’re thinking
GET AID IN NOW!
Have you found yourself looking away when confronted with the images of starving children in Gaza? It’s difficult for the eye to linger on pictures of little children reduced to bags of bones. It’s appalling to see spines protruding through translucent skin, eyes sunken and glassing over. Youthful smiles replaced by the look of the haunted.
The United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, is warning that 90% of children in the enclave lack food essential for healthy growth, describing a catastrophic ‘escalation in nutrition deprivation’. ‘This is evidence of the horrific impact the conflict and restrictions are having on families’ ability to meet children’s food needs – and the speed at which it places children at risk of life-threatening malnutrition,’ UNICEF said.
Blockades in aid mean children are dying from malnutrition and dehydration – and the suffering of this especially vulnerable group is unfathomable. Before death, acute malnutrition can lead to muscle wasting, stunted growth and other medical complications including sepsis, meningitis, diarrhoea and severe anaemia.
Eight months of war inside an area the same size as Las Vegas, but with more than three times the population, means 1.7 million people have been internally displaced – half of them children. Many have lost parents, siblings, or limbs. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, at least 15,000 children have been killed, and UNICEF has declared Gaza the most dangerous place in the world to be a child right now.
Not only is food in short supply, but so is medicine, water and shelter. Children are having amputations without anaesthetic. Infections plague Gaza’s injured, and maggots are infesting wounds that never heal for the malnourished. So, if you have looked away, I can’t blame you. I know I have. But we must not.
Now is the time to see, to feel and to demand a ceasefire to get humanitarian aid in and the hostages out, for the sake of the innocent, especially the children, who are suffering as you read this.
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