Fuel shortages and worsening sanitation within the Gaza Strip are shaping as much as be the proper storm for tragedy via the unfold of illness, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.

UNICEF, the UN youngsters’s company, stated there was a critical menace of a mass illness outbreak within the besieged Palestinian territory.

“Without enough fuel, we will see the collapse of sanitation services. So we have then, on top of the mortars and the bombs, a perfect storm for the spread of disease.

“It’s an ideal storm for tragedy,” UNICEF spokesman James Elder told a press briefing in Geneva.

“We have a determined lack of water, faecal matter strewn throughout densely populated settlements, an unacceptable lack of latrines, and extreme, extreme restraints on hand-washing, private hygiene and cleansing.”

Speaking via video-link from Cairo, Elder said the potential for wider loss of life in Gaza was being significantly exacerbated because an estimated 800,000 children in the enclave are displaced from their homes.

“If youngsters’s entry to water and sanitation in Gaza continues to be restricted and inadequate, we are going to see a tragic but totally avoidable surge within the variety of youngsters dying,” said Elder.

“It’s additionally vital to notice it is beginning to rain in Gaza. Now mixed, youngsters face a critical menace of mass illness outbreak. This, after all, can be deadly.”

Hamas gunmen stormed across the border from Gaza into Israel on October 7, killing around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking around 240 people hostage, according to Israeli officials.

In retaliation, Israel launched a relentless bombing campaign and ground offensive in Gaza, killing more than 13,300 Palestinians, thousands of them children, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Supplies of water, electricity, fuel and food were cut off to the impoverished and densely populated territory in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks.

Elder called for the release of 30 or so children being held hostage “someplace on this hellscape”, saying their fear and torment “has to finish”.

UNICEF is especially involved concerning the danger of a cholera outbreak within the Gaza Strip, fearing an exponential rise in youngster deaths if an outbreak was to strike.

Cholera, which has not up to now been detected in Gaza, is contracted from a bacterium that’s typically transmitted via contaminated meals or water.

It causes diarrhoea and vomiting, and will be particularly harmful for younger youngsters.