UNICEF warns of water crisis in Gaza

UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell warned of the lack of safe water in the Gaza Strip, which will cause more children to die due to diseases, stressing at the same time that “access to sufficient amounts of clean water is a matter of life and death”.

The UN official said, in a press statement, that children in Gaza have barely a drop of water to drink, forcing them and their families to use highly salinated or polluted water from unsafe sources, adding that “without safe water, many more children will die from deprivation and disease in the coming days”.

She explained that in an attempt to escape the ongoing bombing, which has greatly affected water production, treatment and distribution networks in the Strip, more than 1.4 million Gazans sought refuge in shelters or facilities run by UNRWA. Recently, displaced children in southern Rafah receive between 1.5 and 2 liters of water a day only, as water services are “at the point of collapse.”

Russell pointed that the minimum amount of water for survival is three liters per day, adding that despite the worry of water crisis, hundreds of thousands of displaced people, half of whom are children, are still in acute need of food, shelter, medicines and protection.

The Israeli occupation continues its intense and unprecedented aggression against the Gaza Strip for the seventy-sixth day in a row, bombing it by air, land and sea, targeting areas, residential communities, hospitals, schools, and shelters for the displaced, with planes, fighters, artillery, and warships, and demolishing homes over the heads of their residents, in light of a stifling siege of the sector and severe restrictions on the entry of fuel and urgent vital aid to alleviate the catastrophic humanitarian conditions. (QNA)