Gaza City, June 4 (RHC)-- Israel’s policy of starvation threatens the lives of more than 3,500 Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip amid "deafening international silence," the Gaza media office has warned.  

The government's media office said in a Monday statement that “more than 3,500 children under the age of five are at risk of death in Gaza due to Israeli policies of starving children.”  It also warned about “a severe shortage of milk and food, a lack of nutritional supplements, and the denial of vaccinations."

Since Israel's military forces launched the incursion in Rafah in early May, access to healthcare has been even more devastated.  The regime’s forces have closed the border to outgoing wounded people seeking treatment and blocked already scarce humanitarian aid.

This is all happening "amid deafening international silence,” the media office added.

Many of those children are now malnourished or disabled, according to UNICEF’s director of private fundraising and partnerships.

UNICEF warned that the ongoing situation in Rafah “is a disaster for children.  “If nutrition supplies, especially ready-to-use therapeutic food, used to address malnutrition among children, cannot be distributed, the treatment of more than 3,000 children with acute malnutrition will be interrupted,” said Jonathan Crickx, chief of communication for UNICEF in Palestine.

Around 1.7 million people in the Gaza Strip are estimated to have been internally displaced – half of them children, who do not have enough access to water, food, fuel and medicine.

Earlier, a Palestinian child starved to death in central Gaza, according to the Palestinian official news agency Wafa.