While the world focuses on the escalating conflict between Israel and Iran, the aid organization UNICEF sees the situation in Gaza deteriorating daily. James Elder spent two weeks in the Gaza Strip and tells NU.nl what he saw.
Warning: this article contains details and images that may be experienced as shocking.
Elder, international spokesperson for UNICEF, had been to Gaza four times before. This was his fifth visit to the area since the war broke out. In the past twenty months, he has seen the situation deteriorate further and further. His most recent visit was also marked by new “horrific and deadly lows.”
“Someone said to me: ‘We have learned to live without our houses, which have been destroyed. We have learned to live without our loved ones, our safety. We have even learned to live without food, knowing that it can take a number of days. But we cannot live without water,'” Elder tells NU.nl. The shortages of water, food and medicine have reached a new low, making life in Gaza even more unbearable, he sees.
What does an average day look like for a child in Gaza now? “It starts early in the morning, when it’s still dark,” he says. “That’s because drones are constantly flying overhead and air strikes take place regularly.” There are hardly any houses left and cooling is almost nowhere to be found, so children now sleep in overcrowded, hot tents.
When day breaks, the search for water begins, Elder continues. There is hardly any electricity in Gaza. And no electricity means no clean drinking water, because purification plants cannot run. As a result, Palestinians are now dependent on drinking water that is distributed via trucks.
But there is also a shortage of fuel, says Elder. “So we have now reached the point where people have to drink brackish water (water that is saltier than fresh water, but not as salty as seawater, ed.).” If you drink too much of that, you can become dehydrated due to the high salt content.
And there is hunger. The UN recently designated Gaza as the “hungriest place on earth”, making malnutrition one of the biggest threats to Palestinian children. Elder says that Gaza is constantly on the verge of an officially determined famine before Israel gradually allows some aid back into Gaza.
“Famine means mass death,” he says. “But starvation – the slow collapse of the immune system – begins long before official boundaries are crossed.”
During trauma processing, children hear new air strikes
One of the new lows that Elder saw during his most recent visit was the impact of the war on children’s mental health. “In Gaza, we are now entering unknown territory in that area,” he says. UNICEF helps children process the things they have experienced. “But in order to process trauma, it is important that psychological support is not given in a place that is still under fire.”
As a result, it is like bailing out water with a tap open, Elder explains. “Psychologists talk to Palestinian children about their stress and anxieties. But the moment they talk about it, the next air strike is already taking place.” Almost no place is safe, and there is no safe house to return to.
Elder met six-year-old Dana in Gaza. She lost her entire family in 2023 in an attack on her home. “It took half a year before she spoke a word again for the first time,” says Elder. She slowly recovered. But recently she was back in the hospital after the house of family she was staying with was hit by a rocket. Again she lost at least six family members.
At GHF locations, might makes right
Elder estimates that UNICEF can now provide about 20 to 30 percent of the aid needed in Gaza. According to him, this is mainly due to restrictions that Israel imposes on emergency aid. What doesn’t help is the arrival of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the controversial Israeli-American initiative that claims a large part of the emergency aid.
There are only a “handful” of locations where GHF distributes aid, says Elder. At these aid locations, might makes right, which regularly causes chaos. It regularly happens that drones open fire on the crowd, he says. Israel denies targeting crowds and says it only fires warning shots.
“I met a thirteen-year-old boy in the hospital,” says Elder. “He was injured at a GHF location by shrapnel from a tank shell that tore through his stomach and pancreas.” Due to a shortage of painkillers, the boy was in agony.
“On the day I left Gaza, I heard that the boy had died from his injuries. Killed while trying to get food for his family: that’s what those GHF locations are.” In the article below you can read more about how Israel is using the GHF as a war tactic.
‘Children groan in pain due to a shortage of painkillers’
Elder visited a number of hospitals during his trip through Gaza. “I saw dozens of children in hospitals with shrapnel wounds, gunshot wounds, burns. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a fourth-degree burn,” he says. “What struck me during this visit to Gaza is that you don’t just see the wounds. You also hear them, because children groan in pain. There is a serious shortage of painkillers.”
Elder says he sometimes suffers from guilt. “There is a degree of guilt you feel when eating a decent meal,” he says. “I feel guilty when I bury my head in a pillow to muffle the sound of air strikes, knowing that children just a little further away can’t sleep because they are lying in tents.”
On the other end of the line, defeat and sadness can be heard in his voice. At certain moments during the interview, emotions take over. In Gaza, death is everywhere.