“There were quite a few children like that in the ward. Many much younger babies…skeletal. I hate to say it, but I don’t know if some of them will be alive this morning.”
Mr Elder said that the ward he visited was “at capacity”, and filled with malnourished children.
According to Unicef, one in three children under the age of two in the north of the Strip currently suffering with acute malnutrition. Prior to Israel’s invasion, this figure stood at just 0.8 per cent for all children under five.
Mr Elder, who has worked for Unicef for two decades, said that there were many more children suffering who can’t access hospitals, most of which are closed or severely damaged.
Describing what he had seen in Gaza, he said: “There’s a sunken look of terror in the child’s eyes, one of fear and bewilderment and there’s an ominous look in a parent’s eyes when they realise that their child right in front of them is slipping away.”
The UN’s hunger monitoring system, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) initiative, warned on Monday that famine is “imminent” in the north of the Gaza Strip, with hundreds of thousands of people now facing “catastrophic” levels of hunger.