The head of Save the Children International, Inger Ashing, delivered a searing address to the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday, accusing Israel of deliberately engineering famine in Gaza and warning that the world’s inaction is enabling war crimes against Palestinian children.

“The Gaza famine is here. An engineered famine. A predicted famine. A manmade famine,” Ashing said. “As we speak, children in Gaza are systematically being starved to death. This is starvation as a method of war in its starkest terms.”

A Nation’s Children Wasting Away

Ashing described how Save the Children’s clinics in Gaza, once filled with desperate mothers and emaciated children, are now eerily silent — not because the crisis has eased, but because so many children no longer have the strength to cry. Their frail bodies, ravaged by hunger and disease, are left without the medical and nutritional supplies they need to survive.

Just kilometers away, thousands of aid trucks loaded with food, medicine, and fuel remain blocked by Israeli authorities. “The Government of Israel could end this famine tonight if it chose to,” Ashing told the Council. “Instead, it is deliberately obstructing humanitarian assistance while escalating attacks on hospitals and civilians.”

From Dreams of Peace to Wishes for Death

Children in Gaza are so broken by hunger and despair that even their dreams reflect the horror of siege. In Save the Children’s “wishing cloud” exercises, where children write down their hopes, the transformation is heartbreaking.

Once they wished for school, peace, or reunion with friends. Today, many simply wish for bread. Increasingly, they wish for death.

“One child wrote, ‘I wish I was in heaven where my mother is. In heaven there is love, there is food and water,’” Ashing recounted.

132,000 Children at Risk

The figures are staggering. According to Save the Children, at least 132,000 children under five are now at risk of acute malnutrition — double the number recorded in May 2025. Pregnant women and new mothers are starving at rates seven times higher than before the siege tightened in March.

The famine is not accidental, Ashing stressed, but the “predictable result of a sustained Israeli policy to strangle Gaza by blocking food, medicine, and fuel.”

“The Jaws of Death”

Families now refer to Israel’s militarized aid distribution points as “the jaws of death,” where Palestinians are forced to risk being shot or trampled while scrambling for scraps of food. Ashing dismissed Western “creative solutions” such as airdrops as cruel distractions that deliver almost no meaningful aid while killing civilians.

“What Gaza’s children need is simple,” she said. “An end to the illegal siege, unimpeded UN-led humanitarian access, and accountability for those starving them.”

Crimes Against Children

Ashing reminded the Security Council that Gaza’s children are being killed not only by bombs and bullets but now by hunger — a slow, excruciating death that leaves lifelong scars even for survivors. Malnutrition leads to stunting, weakened immunity, impaired brain development, and generational health consequences.

Beyond Gaza, Ashing condemned Israel’s escalating violence in the West Bank, where Palestinian children face home demolitions, settler attacks, and the trauma of arbitrary detention in Israeli military courts. “Palestinian children are the only children in the world systematically prosecuted in military courts — courts that fail every international standard of juvenile justice,” she said.

A Call to the World: Stop Enabling Atrocities

Save the Children urged UN member states to take immediate steps to halt the atrocities in Gaza, demanding an immediate and permanent ceasefire, the lifting of Israel’s illegal siege to restore unhindered humanitarian aid access, an end to arms transfers fueling the conflict, the release of all Palestinian children held in Israeli military detention, and accountability for Israel’s war crimes, emphasizing that the international community must stop enabling these violations and act decisively to protect Gaza’s children from further suffering.

“For nearly two years, the international community has failed to protect Palestinian children,” Ashing warned. “Until you act, this is the fate you are guaranteeing a generation of children in Gaza. Inaction is a choice. Indecision is complicity.”

Her closing words were a direct challenge to world leaders:

“Children have reached their breaking point. Where is yours?” (ILKHA)