Deir el-Balah, November 3 (RHC)-- Rachael Cummings, a health specialist with Save the Children, says the fact that 50 children have been killed in Gaza over the past 48 hours shows the “intensity of this conflict and this war on children.”

The Israeli attack on a polio vaccine centre yesterday, additionally, will have a “knock-on effect” on mothers who have little trust in ensuring their children are safe when being vaccinated, Cummings told Al Jazeera from Gaza’s Deir el-Balah.

“They’d have to weigh up that with the risk of another hospital, another healthcare facility being attacked,” she said, adding that 20,000 children are missing or have become unaccompanied in this conflict in the last year while another 14,000 children have been killed.

With no formal education, being constantly displaced and living under the threat of bombs, children’s “sense of normality, their sense of stability has been ripped away from them”, Cummings said.

“[Children are] having to take on roles within family settings that are not for children. They take on caregiver roles. They have to take on fetching water, trying to find food,” she added.

“They have seen things that no child should ever see.”