More than 340 children have been reported killed in Gaza since the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas was announced a little over a year ago, the UN Children’s Fund said on Friday, with hundreds more injured. UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires told journalists in Geneva that in the last two weeks alone five boys and two girls were reported killed and at least 33 children seriously injured in airstrikes, drone strikes and gunfire across the Strip, and that two more boys died of earlier injuries.
For families mourning their children, Pires said, those statistics do not equate with a ceasefire. UNICEF puts the number of children still displaced in Gaza at 800,000, most living in tents or in damaged buildings, and estimates that 60,000 children have lost one or both parents during the war or since the ceasefire, with nearly every child in the territory needing some form of mental health support.
The agency tied the casualty figures to the flow of goods. Asked about reports that private traders had halted cooperation with the Israeli authorities on commercial food trucks, a dispute covered on this site on October 15 when Israel halted commercial goods entry, Pires stressed that an uninterrupted flow of humanitarian and commercial goods remained essential to children’s recovery, and warned against a return to the conditions in which famine was declared last year.
UNICEF also raised a winter warning: displaced families are filling empty flour bags with sand to keep rainwater out of tents, and the damaged drainage network has left large pools of wastewater, including the Sheikh Radwan stormwater basin, that could overflow into residential areas when the rains arrive. The agency said it has helped more than 560,000 children return to learning since the ceasefire and provided safe water to 1.2 million people.