In Gaza, doctors no longer see “normal-sized babies”: a United Nations official said Friday he was “horrified” about the average of 180 women who, hungry, dehydrated, give birth to children in the Palestinian enclave every day.

“Personally, I am leaving Gaza this week in terror for the one million women and girls in Gaza, for the 650,000 women of childbearing age, above all for the 180 women who give birth every day,” said Dominic Allen, head of the of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) delegation to the Palestinian territories, during a press conference he gave digitally, via video link from Jerusalem.

He was able to visit some hospitals where maternity wards are still operating in the northern Gaza Strip — where at least 31,000 people have died since Israeli military operations began, according to Hamas’ health ministry.

“Doctors have reported that they are no longer seeing normal-sized babies (…) Instead, tragically, they are seeing more stillbirths and more neonatal deaths,” Mr. Allen continued, describing pregnant women “exhausted, from fear, from being forced to be repeatedly displaced, from hunger’, from dehydration…

“Mothers should be holding their babies, not wrapping them in body bags,” he gushed.

He also highlighted the lack of essential goods, such as anesthetics for cases requiring caesarean sections, and denounced the Israeli authorities’ refusal to let through UNFPA shipments of aid, particularly “maternity kits”, and removing items such as lenses, or photovoltaic panels .

“If I could paint a picture of what I saw and heard while I was in Gaza (…) it’s a nightmare bigger than a humanitarian crisis, it’s a crisis for humanity,” he said. “Worse than I could describe, than the pictures show, than you can imagine.”

What he saw while crossing the northern Gaza Strip he said “broke his heart”, speaking of “indescribable emotions” in people’s eyes.

“All the people we saw, that we talked to, were bony, terribly emaciated, hungry, gesticulating trying to tell us that they needed something to eat,” he described.

He also recounted that passing through an army checkpoint, he saw “a little boy, who was not 5 years old, walking in terror, with his hands up, with his sister, a couple of years older, behind him, holding a white flag.”

The war broke out on October 7, triggered by an unprecedented raid by Hamas’ military arm against southern sectors of Israeli territory that left more than 1,160 people dead, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on in official Israeli data.