GENEVA: The head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency on Thursday voiced concern that children suffering from malnutrition in Gaza will die if emergency provisions are not immediately put in place during Israel’s Gaza City military operation.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said that its data showed a six-fold increase in the number of children suffering from malnutrition in Gaza City since March.
“We have a population that is extremely weak that will be confronted with a new major military operation,” he told a Geneva press club meeting. “Many will simply not have the strength to undergo a new displacement.”
“Many of them will not survive,” he said of the children, addressing the audience in French. “It is a manufactured and fabricated famine. It is deliberate. Food has been used as an instrument of war,” he said.
In May, a global hunger monitor said that half a million people in the Gaza Strip faced starvation but stopped short of using the term famine.
Israel’s military agency that coordinates aid, COGAT, has previously said it invests considerable efforts to ensure aid reaches Gaza and has denied restricting supplies.
UNRWA chief warns many malnourished children will die in Gaza City operation
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UNRWA chief warns many malnourished children will die in Gaza City operation
- “We have a population that is extremely weak that will be confronted with a new major military operation”: Lazzarini
- “Many of them will not survive,” he said of the children
Israel aims to bring ‘permanent demographic change’ to West Bank, Gaza: UN
- UN rights chief Volker Turk says Israeli military operation in West Bank’s north has displaced 32,000 Palestinians
GENEVA: Israel’s actions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip seem aimed at creating “permanent demographic change,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said on Thursday.
“Taken together, Israel’s actions appear aimed at making a permanent demographic change in Gaza and the West Bank, raising concerns about ethnic cleansing,” Turk said in a speech before the UN’s Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Turk pointed in particular to an ongoing, year-long Israeli military operation in the West Bank’s north that has caused the displacement of 32,000 Palestinians.
Elsewhere in the West Bank, entire Bedouin herder communities have been displaced by increasing harassment and violence from Israeli settlers, including near Mikhmas to the east of Ramallah, and Ras Ein Al-Auja, in the Jordan Valley, since the start of the year.
In addition to roughly three million Palestinians, more than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements and outposts in the West Bank, which are considered illegal under international law.
Israel has approved a series of initiatives this month backed by far-right ministers, including launching a process to register land in the West Bank as “state property” and allowing Israelis to purchase land there directly, in a move condemned by several countries as well as Hamas.
Israel’s current government has accelerated settlement expansion, approving a record 54 settlements in 2025, according to Israeli settlement watchdog NGO Peace Now.
Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967.
‘Maximum land, minimum Arabs’
In the Gaza Strip, most of the territory’s 2.2 million inhabitants have been displaced at least once since the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Intensified attacks, the methodical destruction of entire neighborhoods and the denial of humanitarian assistance appeared to aim at a permanent demographic shift in Gaza,” the UN human rights office said in a report last week.
Israeli far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also vowed to encourage “emigration” from the Palestinian territories in February.
“We will finally, formally and in practical terms nullify the cursed Oslo Accords and embark on a path toward sovereignty, while encouraging emigration from both Gaza and Judea and Samaria,” he said, using the Biblical term for the West Bank.
“There is no other long-term solution,” added Smotrich, who himself lives in a settlement in the West Bank.
“They want maximum land and minimum Arabs,” Fathi Nimer, a researcher with Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, told AFP, referring to a commonly used phrase used to describe Israeli settlement tactics.
