A high risk of famine persists across the Gaza Strip with 96 percent of people there facing high levels of acute food insecurity. In Sudan, there is growing evidence that the civil war, now in its second year, is creating the world’s largest hunger crisis with an estimated 24 million children left especially vulnerable. Geoff Bennett discussed more with UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Geoff Bennett:
A high risk of famine persists across the Gaza Strip, with 96 percent of Gaza's more than two million people facing high levels of acute food insecurity. That stark number comes from a report released today by a coalition of U.N. agencies and nonprofit humanitarian organizations known as the IPC. It rates the severity of food crises.
They found that, in Southern Gaza, the situation has deteriorated since the start of the Israeli offensive in Rafah nearly two months ago. And, in Sudan, there is growing evidence that the civil war, now in its second year, is creating the world's largest hunger crisis. The conflict is propelling the country toward famine, with an estimated 24 million children left especially vulnerable.
Catherine Russell joins us now. She's executive director of UNICEF and joins us from Sudan.
Welcome back to the "NewsHour."
Catherine Russell, Executive Director, UNICEF:
Thanks very much, Geoff.
Geoff Bennett:
The biggest hunger crisis in the world is unfolding in Sudan right now, and it is manmade. The warring groups are restricting the delivery of desperately needed aid. How does that affect the relief effort? And what does it mean for the children that your organization aims to assist?
Catherine Russell:
Well, thank you.
I think that the thing to understand about Sudan is that there are several terrible things happening at one time. One is that there is a terrible conflict here, and children are being directly impacted by that, children being killed, maimed, and other things.
We estimate that four million children are severely malnourished right now. And that's because we can't get access to food. We can't get access to the children. Of that number, over 700,000 are what we call severely acute malnutrition. And those children are honestly, Geoff, near death.
And it's quite terrifying for us to deal with this. They need therapeutic feeding, and the challenge for us is that we can't get to them. And if I could also add that one of the other problems we have is that roughly 17 million children of 19 million children who should be in school are out of school right now and have been out of school for a year.
So all of these terrible things are happening to children at one time, and it makes Sudan one of the worst places in the world to be a child.
Geoff Bennett:
Sudan now also has the largest number of displaced people in the world, the largest child displacement crisis.
I understand you recently visited a site for internally displaced people and spent some time visiting with young girls. What did you see? What did they tell you?
Catherine Russell:
I met girls who had been displaced, a couple of them several times, and they ended up in this facility where we were working with them.
They had to flee their homes. One girl told me she didn't have anything with her, no papers, nothing. But these girls still somehow have optimism about the future. And I was saying to them, what do you think about when you get older? What do you want to be? And two of them — I met with four of them, and two of them told me they wanted to be lawyers.
One wanted to be a doctor. One wanted to be an architect. Even in the worst situations, they can think about something positive. But we are not doing enough to make it safe and easy for them to live and to grow up and to have a decent life.
Geoff Bennett:
It might be too late to stop the descent into famine in Sudan, but what's needed right now to mitigate it?
Catherine Russell:
One is that we need better access, right? We have got to be able to get to these children, and we have got to be able to provide the resources they need so that they can survive.
And, second — and this is what the kids told me yesterday — what they really need is peace, and they want peace desperately.
Geoff Bennett:
I also want to ask you about the desperate situation in Gaza.
The IPC says that almost half-a-million Gazans are facing what they call catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity. International aid operations have all but collapsed since Israel's offensive in Rafah, according to their report. How would you characterize the situation on the ground in Gaza right now?
Catherine Russell:
Catastrophic is a good word for it. It is again a situation where we do not have sufficient access to the people who need the help, to the children who need the help.
A lot of reasons for that, but, at the end of the day, the world is failing these children. And we have to do better. We have to get to them the provisions that make it possible for them to survive and ultimately have a decent life. That's not what's happening right now.
Geoff Bennett:
For children in conflict zones, beyond the urgent and immediate need for food and safe and stable shelter, there are so often, as you well know, mental health issues that go unaddressed, trauma that goes unaddressed.
These kids obviously are not in school. What's the long-term implication of that?
Catherine Russell:
Conflict and war is the worst thing for children, for two reasons, one, because they're affected directly by it, right? They can be killed or maimed, but, two, because children really rely on government services. That means education and health care.
And when they can't get that, it makes their situation very precarious. And the challenges of the long-term psychosocial issues are real. I mean, these kids have suffered so much. I met a woman today who's a counselor here in the — Port Sudan, and who is working with children who have real trauma issues.
What that's going to look like 20, 30 years from now, lord knows, but it will be bad. And it is quite destabilizing for them right now and something we're trying really hard to deal with. But part of it, as I said, is access. Part of it also is, we all need more resources to deal with this, because the demands are so incredible on us and the partners that we're working with on the ground.
Geoff Bennett:
Catherine Russell, executive director of UNICEF, joining us tonight from Sudan, thanks so much.
Catherine Russell:
Thanks so much.
