Aid workers in Gaza: Children are emaciated and residents are dying

UN officials and aid workers on the ground have warned of catastrophic conditions on the ground in Gaza, describing children as thin as paper while residents are exposed to cruel death due to starvation in the Strip, as international pressure mounts to reach a ceasefire during the fraught talks underway in Qatar.

After months of infighting, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution on Monday calling for an immediate truce.

Hamas rejected the latest proposal for a ceasefire agreement because it wants any truce to lead to an end to the war. Israel says it is prepared to consider only a temporary halt to the fighting. 

After six months of war, aid workers say time is running out for some 1.1 million Palestinians who are either on the brink of starvation or already suffering from such conditions.

In Gaza, UNICEF spokesman James Elder described seeing paper-thin children in a hospital in the north and incubators full of underweight babies from malnourished mothers.

He said: Life-saving aid is being obstructed. Lives are being lost, he said. I saw children whose malnutrition was so severe that they looked like skeletons.

Speaking to The Independent from Gaza's European Hospital near Khan Yunis - a city that was the focus of one of Israel's most ferocious ground attacks - the veteran humanitarian workers said the situation was "beyond comprehension".

“The only words to use are paper thin,” said Arvind Das, head of the International Rescue Committee’s (IRC) Gaza team. “There are children and women who have virtually no flesh, which only complicates the recovery process.”

He and his colleagues usually give nutritional supplements and intravenous fluids to malnourished people, "but we had nothing to give," he told The Independent.