By Tendai Makaripe
Gaza City, the last refuge for families in the northern Gaza Strip, is fast becoming a place where childhood cannot survive, a United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) official said Friday, calling it a city of fear, flight and funerals.
Speaking at a United Nations noon briefing, UNICEF’s Middle East and North Africa communications manager Tess Ingram said Gaza’s humanitarian crisis had reached a breaking point.
“This unthinkable is not looming — it is already here. The escalation is underway,” she said.
Ingram described meeting mothers whose children died of starvation and visiting clinics where “parents were in tears, children fighting the double-punch of disease and malnutrition.”
Only 44 of 92 UNICEF-supported nutrition centres in Gaza City remain functional, she said, leaving thousands of children without treatment.
Localising the crisis, Palestinian Ambassador to Zimbabwe Dr. Tamer Almassri condemned the killings and displacement of civilians.
“It is a full-on genocide,” he said.
“The Israeli apartheid regime targets our civilians, our children, and our women. Unfortunately, even hospitals, churches, mosques, and clinics are not spared.”
The impact on children has been especially severe. Ingram recounted the case of two-year-old Jouri, who died from malnutrition last month, and her sister Jana, who is still fighting for survival.
“Without immediate and increased access to food and nutrition treatments, more children will starve. An entirely preventable fate,” she said.
Zimbabwe has long voiced support for Palestine at international forums, with civil society and faith groups calling for urgent humanitarian aid.
Local child-rights advocates note that the suffering of Gaza’s children resonates in Zimbabwe, where poverty and food insecurity also threaten young lives.
UNICEF said it continues to provide therapeutic food, safe drinking water, child-protection services and emergency education support in Gaza, but Ingram stressed that aid is far from enough.
“Palestinian life is being dismantled here, steadily but surely. The suffering of children in the Gaza Strip is not accidental,” she said.
