One in five children in Gaza City is malnourished and cases are increasing every day, the UN's Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) says.In a statement issued on Thursday, Unrwa Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini cited a colleague telling him: "People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses."More than 100 international aid organisations and human rights groups have also warned of mass starvation - pressing for governments to take action.
Israel, which controls the entry of all supplies into Gaza, says there is no siege and blames Hamas for any cases of malnutrition.The UN, however, has warned that the level of aid getting into Gaza is "a trickle" and the hunger crisis in the territory "has never been so dire".In his statement on Thursday, Lazzarini said "more than 100 people, the vast majority of them children, have reportedly died of hunger".
"Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak and at high risk of dying if they don't get the treatment they urgently need," he said, pleading for Israel to "allow humanitarian partners to bring unrestricted and uninterrupted humanitarian assistance to Gaza".Unrwa workers are "increasingly fainting from hunger while at work", according to Lazzarini, who added: "When caretakers cannot find enough to eat, the entire humanitarian system is collapsing".
On Wednesday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said a large proportion of the population of Gaza was "starving"."I don't know what you would call it other than mass starvation - and it's man-made," the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said.Listen: The story behind the harrowing photograph of a starving Gaza babyIn northern Gaza, Hanaa Almadhoun, 40, said local markets are often without food and other supplies.
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