Aa / gaza / hosni nadim
The Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip said on Monday that 16,278 Palestinian children were killed by the Israeli army as part of the genocidal war that it has been carrying out since October 7, 2023, a child killed every 40 minutes.
This is what emerges from a press conference organized by the ministry at the Nasser medical complex in Khan Younes, in the south of the Gaza Strip, to launch the global solidarity campaign with the children of the besieged Palestinian enclave.
The ministry explained that “among these martyrs are 908 infants under a year and 311 children born and killed during the genocide”.
He warned against the escalation of the health and humanitarian disaster which strikes the Gaza Strip more than 18 months after the start of the Israeli genocidal war, which led to general destruction and tragic conditions, especially in children, women and the elderly.
During the conference, Marwan al-Hams, director of campaign hospitals within the ministry, said that the Israeli blockade and the closure of crossing points for more than two months have aggravated the health situation. Primary health care centers have been closed due to bombing or because they are located in evacuation areas, thus depriving thousands of children and women pregnant of basic medical care.
Al-Hams said that the shortage of drugs for the treatment of women and children has reached 51 %, especially nutritional supplements, vitamins, vaccines and milk for infants.
He added that polio vaccines are still blocked at border crossing points, which threatens to undermine the prevention efforts already undertaken.
The ministry recorded the death of 57 children due to malnutrition and health complications, in a context of serious shortage of therapeutic milk, especially for children with special needs.
Al-Hams added that having to be satisfied with one meal per day, which is more incomplete, has led to a state of thinness and malnutrition in many children, “while they were deprived of drinking water and healthy foods due to targeting infrastructure by occupation and refusal to authorize the entrance to the aid.”
The ministry also documented the assassination of Palestinian children who were trying to obtain food rations from charities that were directly bombed.
He pointed out that thousands of children are now homeless and live in displaced camps that do not have the minimum vital, while pregnant women experience enormous difficulties in accessing hospitals, especially at night, when the bombings are intensifying.
At the end of the press conference, the ministry launched an appeal to international institutions and “people of conscience around the world”, urging them to take urgent and immediate measures to end famine and save the children of the Gaza of the killing machine, famine and refusal to access drugs, stressing that “silence is a crime” in the process of being a crime.
At the beginning of March ended the first phase of a cease-fire and prisoner exchange agreement between Hamas and Israel, which entered into force on January 19, 2025, with the mediation of Egypt and Qatar and the support of the United States.
Although the Palestinian resistance movement has respected all the terms of this agreement, Netanyahu, which is under an arrest warrant of the International Criminal Court (ICC), decided not to launch the second phase and resumed its genocide in Gaza on March 18, in order to serve its own political interests while bending to the requirements of the most extremist faction of its right -wing government, according to Israeli media.
Since October 7, 2023 and with the total support of the United States, Israel has committed a systematic genocide in the Gaza Strip, causing more than 171,000 Palestinian victims (dead and injured) including a majority of women and children.
*Translated from Arabic by Mourad Belhaj
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