UNICEF says an average of one child has been either killed or maimed every 17 minutes in the Gaza Strip
GENEVA — Children have paid the heaviest price in Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza for the past two years, with a staggering 61,000 children reportedly killed or maimed, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said.
“That’s an average of one child either killed or maimed every 17 minutes. This is an unacceptable staggering figure that we still have to live with today,” Ricardo Peres, UNICEF Deputy Spokesperson, told a press briefing in Geneva on Tuesday.
Peres said this was due to Israel’s “disproportionate response” to the October 7 resistance operation against Israel.
Condemning the “unspeakable violence” of the day, Peres stated that “today is also the day that we ask Israel to stop the indiscriminate killing of children across the Gaza Strip.”
Children “have been suffering in their bodies and their minds for way too long. They’ve been traumatised, exposed to horrors that no child should ever have to look at or live,” he continued.
He emphasised that children have been orphaned, lost their homes, been displaced multiple times, and “been exposed to disease and violence in a scale that is unprecedented for Gaza.”
“So today we call on Israel to stop that violence. We call for a ceasefire,” Peres stressed.
One in Five Babies Born Prematurely
He said UNICEF welcomed US President Donald Trump’s proposal for peace, but warned that Israel’s attacks continue in the northern part of Gaza as well as the south, with “bombardments, airstrikes, children dying.”
Peres raised concern that the UN agency has been denied permission to bring incubators and ventilators to children from the north, stressing that the babies were “desperately needing that to survive.”
“We’re talking about children sharing oxygen masks in order to stay alive and those requests have been declined day in and day out and we’re still waiting today hopefully for that to happen,” he stated.
According to UNICEF, one in five babies in Gaza is now born prematurely, often to mothers weakened by hunger and stress.
“So again the horrors of October 7 can never be forgotten … But the disproportionate response that followed and today continues needs to end, and it needs to end now,” Peres said.
Hospitals Partially Operating
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), only 14 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are still partially operating – none in northern Gaza – and just 62 primary health-care centers remain partly functional, compared with a pre-war total of 176, a UN News report stated on Tuesday.
WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said that official figures confirm 400 malnutrition-related deaths since January 2025, including 101 children, 80 of them under five. Over 10,000 children have been diagnosed with acute malnutrition in the past two months, and about 2,400 severely malnourished children are at risk of starvation.
Speaking to reporters, the WHO spokesperson warned that the true toll is likely much higher, as many families in overcrowded shelters cannot reach clinics or hospitals.
“Famine that was once confined to Gaza City is now spreading south as people flee renewed fighting,” he explained.
Aid Missions Denied
Over the past two years, the UN has made more than 8,000 coordinated mission and movement requests to Israel, of which more than a quarter have been denied, Jens Laerke, Spokesperson for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said at a press briefing.
Out of the more than 8,000 requests, “45 percent have been denied or impeded,” Laerke stated.
“Impeded means that they have been allowed to start, but they have been impeded on route and have either been held up, delayed, or even forced to return. Ten percent of the requests that we have put in have been withdrawn,” he explained.
Laerke added, “That is typically because (the) situations change between the request is submitted and the reply comes back. And 45%, so less than half, have been facilitated by Israeli authorities and reached their intended target,” he continued.
According to the UN OCHA, 90 percent of Gaza’s current population of 2.1 million people has been displaced, lacking access to sufficient shelter, food, life-saving medical services, clean water, education and livelihoods.
UNRWA ‘Fact Sheet’
UNRWA also released a “fact sheet” on the humanitarian consequences of the two years of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, saying nearly 80 percent of structures have been damaged or destroyed across the Strip.
Over 370 UNRWA workers were killed, while nearly all UNRWA facilities “were impacted during the war and at least 845 people killed when sheltering in an UNRWA facility.”
There have been over 790 attacks on health workers, patients, hospitals, and other medical infrastructure in Gaza, while “less than 40 percent of remain functional, all partially,” the agency noted.
Nearly 660,000 children were forced out of school for the third year in a row, “half of them went to UNRWA schools,” the agency said.
Nearly 92 percent of school buildings “will either need full reconstruction or major rehabilitation to be functional again.”
Around 90 percent of UNRWA schools “were hit or damaged, many while sheltering displaced families.”
Over half a million children received psycho-social support activities.
Gaza Health Ministry Figures
The Palestinian Ministry of Health reported on Tuesday the catastrophic collapse of the health sector in Gaza after two years of Israel’s genocidal assault on the enclave.
“Hospitals have turned into concrete structures due to direct and indirect military strikes, completely emptied of diagnostic and therapeutic care components,” the ministry said in a statement.
It noted that “25 out of 38 hospitals are out of service, and 1,701 medical staff were martyred” by the Israeli army. Israel also destroyed 103 primary healthcare centers out of 157, while 54 centers operate partially. At the same time, 55% of medicines and 66% of medical consumables are out of stock.
The current death toll is 67,173, including 20,179 children, with 460 deaths recorded due to famine and malnutrition, including 154 children.
Despite widespread international condemnation, little has been done to hold Israel accountable. The nation is currently under investigation for genocide by the International Court of Justice, while accused war criminals, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are officially wanted by the International Criminal Court.
c. The Palestine Chronicle
