United Nations/Prensa Latina
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned this Monday about the consequences of the Israeli offensive in Rafah for 600,000 Palestinian children who remain in that southern Gaza governorate.
The promised ground incursion by the Israel Defense Forces would pose catastrophic risks for hundreds of thousands of children who have no safe place to go, Unicef Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement.
“If large-scale military operations begin, children will not only be at risk of violence, but also chaos and panic, and at a time when their physical and mental states are already weakened,” he warned. The Children’s Fund agreed with calls from other entities to prevent the relocation of civilians, particularly children.
At the same time, he asked for the protection of the infrastructure and the aid on which they depend.
Most of them are injured, sick, malnourished, traumatized or live with a disability, the text further added.
According to the statement, Rafah is now a city of children who have nowhere safe to go in Gaza.
The UN considered it impossible to safely carry out a mass evacuation while Israeli forces “suggested” this Tuesday the evacuation of 30 square kilometers of areas of Rafah.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, nine sites in that governorate house displaced people in the area, which also has three clinics and six warehouses.
The Secretary General, António Guterres, issued an urgent appeal that insisted on the protection of civilians in the face of signs of displacement to leave the governorate.
“We are already seeing movements of people; many of them are in desperate humanitarian conditions and have been repeatedly displaced. “They seek the security that has been denied to them so many times,” said the head of the United Nations.
This Monday, the Israeli army dropped leaflets from planes and sent text messages by phone asking the population to leave several neighborhoods in Rafah, where more than a million overcrowded Palestinians remain.
Tel Aviv forces ordered about 100,000 people to camps in the nearby cities of Khan Younis and Al Mawasi.
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