A senior UN official warned of “generational” impacts in Gaza from malnutrition among pregnant women and babies, urging a surge of aid to help prevent potential lifelong health issues.
“The sheer extent of the devastation looked like the set of a dystopian film,” Andrew Saberton, deputy executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), told reporters after his visit to the war-torn enclave.
He said that a quarter of Gaza’s population is “starving.”
“That includes 11,500 pregnant women for whom starvation is particularly catastrophic for both mother and newborn,” said Saberton, whose agency leads reproductive and maternal health programs around the world.
As a result, 70 percent of newborns are premature or underweight, compared to 20 percent before Hamas’s October 2023 attack on Israel kicked off the war.
“Malnutrition will have generational effects, not on the mother, but on the newborn, likely to result in ever longer lasting care and problems throughout the life of the baby,” he said at UN headquarters in New York.
The recent ceasefire has allowed more freedom of movement for humanitarian workers, said Saberton, but only a “trickle of aid” is being allowed in, that is “nowhere near enough.”
The lack of medical supplies and facilities is also a major factor, he said, with over 94 percent of hospitals damaged or destroyed, and only 15 percent of operational facilities offering emergency obstetric care.
“Maternal death rates are high, partly due to the fact that simple things like contraception are no longer available,” he said, noting some potential mothers are “looking for and doing unsafe abortions.”
In addition, some 700,000 women and girls struggle each month with a lack of privacy, water and sanitary pads during their menstrual cycle.
Saberton warned that an estimated 170,000 people face “significant urinary or reproductive tract problems” that if “not sorted quickly and early, will bring potential lifelong implications.”
Appropriate drugs and medical attention could “easily” fix the issues, he said.
