By Olivia Le Poidevin
GENEVA (Reuters) -Around 12,000 children aged under five in Gaza are suffering from acute malnutrition, and hunger-related deaths are rising, the Director General of the World Health Organization said on Thursday.
“In July, nearly 12,000 children under five years were identified as having acute malnutrition in Gaza, the highest monthly figure ever recorded,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at his organisation’s headquarters in Geneva.
At least 99 people have died, including 64 adults and 35 children, of whom 29 were younger than five, from the start of this year to July 29.
Between June and July, the number of admissions for malnutrition almost doubled – from 6,344 to 11,877 – according to the latest UNICEF figures available.
Some 2,500 of those children are suffering from severe malnutrition.
Tedros called for greater volumes of sustained aid, via all possible routes.
The WHO said it was supporting Gaza’s four malnutrition centres, but that supplies of baby formula and nutritional foods were very low.
“The overall volume of nutrition supplies remains completely insufficient to prevent further deterioration. The market needs to be flooded. There needs to be dietary diversity,” said Rik Peeperkorn, WHO’s representative for the occupied Palestinian Territory, via video link.
A global hunger monitor has said a famine scenario is unfolding in the Gaza Strip, with starvation spreading, children dying of hunger-related causes and humanitarian access to the embattled enclave severely restricted.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said food consumption across Gaza had declined to its lowest level since the onset of the war.
Eighty-one percent of households in the tiny, crowded coastal territory of 2.2 million people reported poor food consumption, up from 33% in April.
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin,Editing by Madeline Chambers and Ed Osmond)
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