Geneva. December 20 (RHC)-- A senior United Nations official has warned that more children in Gaza could die from diseases than from the Israeli bombings in the besieged Palestinian territory.  UNICEF spokesperson James Elder called for an immediate humanitarian truce in Gaza, warning once more that without a truce disease-deaths could outnumber bombing-deaths in the besieged Palestinian territory.

In a Tuesday posting on UNICEF's X platform, Elder announced, “Without sufficient safe water, food, and sanitation that only a humanitarian ceasefire can bring - child deaths due to disease could surpass those killed in bombardments.”

So far, the death toll of Israel’s war on Gaza nears 20,000 of which, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, more than 7,700 were children killed by the Zionist war machine.   Earlier, the UN’s children’s agency said entire neighborhoods in Gaza, where children used to play and go to school, had been reduced to rubble in the month-long bombings of Israeli warplanes.

“The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child,” UNICEF Middle East and North Africa said in an X post on Monday.  “Children need an immediate, long-lasting humanitarian ceasefire.

The Israeli war machine initiated its premeditated war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in retaliation to the Zionists' intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Since the war's start, the Apartheid regime forces have been attacking Gaza towns, villages and refugee camps from the air, land and sea with bombings, shelling and direct military engagement.  In addition, the area is under the “complete siege” of Israeli forces, blocking water, food, medicine and fuel to the region, causing starvation and spreading disease among the 2.3 million defenseless trapped Palestinians.