Excerpts:
I recently spoke by phone with James Elder, UNICEF’s global spokesperson, who just returned from the Strip. Elder has previously worked in countries including Angola, Zimbabwe, Libya, and Sri Lanka. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the wounded children he spoke to in Gaza, the risks people are now willing to take in order to find food, and how parents are trying to cope with unimaginable loss.
How would you say your visit in June was different from your previous visits, if it was different?
Yes, it was, even though I didn’t expect it to be. It was different for several reasons. One is the wounds I saw on children. There were burns on little girls and boys, fourth-degree burns I didn’t know existed. And shrapnel riddled through a body. Shrapnel is designed to go through cement, and what it does to a child’s body is horrific. On one previous trip, I saw a bus of children who spent two days trying to get from the north to the south after being held at Israeli checkpoints, and I walked in the bus, and all I could smell was children’s burning flesh. It doesn’t leave you. And one of the things that struck me this time was that I wasn’t just seeing these children—I was hearing them. There is such a horrendous lack of painkillers that when I’d be in a hospital—and hospitals are wall to wall with people with wounds of war—you’d hear the children and their screams. So I certainly noticed that as a person, parent, human.
The other thing was food and water. Whenever you have warnings of famine, there is big international pressure, and Israel loosens controls so more aid can come in. But then international pressure wanes and the restrictions are tightened again. Once you have famine, people are dying en masse. But there is starvation where a child’s body is degrading and the immune system is starting to collapse, and that’s happening—so children’s bodies aren’t waiting for that technical definition.
We are now so far below the emergency threshold for water. It is in critical shortage now, and it is controlled entirely by Israel. Since electricity to Gaza was cut after the horrors of October 7th, diesel became essential to treat and distribute water, but there’s been a hundred-plus-day blockade on fuel coming into Gaza. We’ve got to a point where, if that doesn’t change or if the electricity isn’t turned back on, which would solve a lot of problems, you’ll start to see children dying of thirst. Water was something that really, really struck me, because it’s absolutely political, not logistical. If Israel allowed fuel or turned on the power for these desalination plants, that problem would be solved. That’s a level of stress on a population I saw that I hadn’t seen before.
The most lethal crisis isn’t just hunger or thirst—it’s the brutal collision of both. And those deaths are often not recorded; when children are severely malnourished, they’re eleven times more likely to die from common childhood illnesses. They’re often not getting to a hospital—first because the hospitals are full of people with wounds of war, and, second, if you just look at the south, there is one fully functioning hospital, and it’s in an evacuation zone. It’s almost impossible to get to unless you’re in an ambulance, because you have to walk through an evacuation zone, which is militarized.
We do a lot of trauma work in Gaza, and the professionals there remind me that you don’t call it P.T.S.D. in Gaza because there’s nothing post—there’s always new traumas coming. They give children skills to deal with nightmares at night. A little girl would explain how she’d pretend she was in her grandfather’s garden and try to smell the basil to help her with nightmares. But the child psychologist would remind me that they’re not just nightmares. They’re also a reality. Sometimes it’s a memory of fleeing your home at two in the morning and seeing your mom get shot.
I was also really conscious of the ninety-eight-per-cent literacy rate there. People say the primary thing is to get kids in school, more often than anyplace I have ever been. That’s a real fear. Now you’ve got the utter devastation of an education system of children. A little girl said to me, “Look at me. I used to be beautiful, but now all I do all day is chase water trucks around.”
at some of the crimes they commit
