The UN warned on Friday that an Israeli plan to take control of 70 per cent of Gaza is sure to increase suffering among children already hit by the impacts of severe overcrowding.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he had ordered the military to take control of more territory in the Gaza Strip, in defiance of the terms of a fragile ceasefire that took effect in October 2025.
The United Nations children’s agency warned that such a move would deepen the health crisis among children in the war-ravaged Palestinian territory, already suffering from a lack of food, water and access to hygiene.
Today, “people have been crammed into around 40 per cent of the space left to them, sheltering among broken buildings, rubble and mounting solid waste”, UNICEF spokesman Salim Oweis told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Gaza, adding “there is no accessible space left to clear” the waste.
“The effects of this are now widely apparent: children with respiratory infections, acute watery diarrhoea, and more than half of all households reporting skin diseases,” he added.
“Fleas, lice and scabies are commonplace,” Oweis said, also pointing to numerous cases of rats biting young children and even babies after getting into tents and other shelters for Gaza’s hundreds of thousands of displaced people.
“Increasing numbers of children are requiring hospitalisation, all without a single fully functioning hospital across Gaza,” he added.
Oweis described the situation as “dire”, noting the overcrowding was “creating more spread of diseases, straining the systems and of course cutting… services”.
If Israel takes control of even more land, that “means that we will lose access to some of the service points, but also (to) some hard to reach places (where) children and families are living,” he said. “This will just mean that more children will suffer.”
Israel has killed more than 900 people in the territory since the ceasefire, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Israel has killed more than 900 people in Gaza since the October 2025 ceasefire. [Getty]
