Safe Drinking Water, a Life and Death Issue in Gaza, UNICEF

On Wednesday, the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) said that access to sufficient quantities of clean water in Gaza is a matter of life and death.

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Children and their families are having to use vital water from unsafe, highly salinated or contaminated sources, warned Unicef Executive Director Catherine Russell.

Without safe drinking water, many more children will die from deprivation and disease in the coming days after more than 10 weeks of near-constant shelling, she said.

Newly displaced children in the southern governorate of Rafah have barely 1.5 to two liters of water a day, according to Unicef estimates released Wednesday in a report.

Water services were on the verge of collapse, while experts calculate the estimated minimum for survival at three liters a day.

In addition, the UN agency also said that due to the lack of drinking water, hundreds of thousands of displaced people (half of them children) are also in desperate need of food, shelter, medicine and protection, added.

Other data compiled by the UN agency shows that at least half of the water and sanitation facilities were damaged or destroyed.

The impact of this situation on children is particularly worrying because they are more susceptible to diarrhea, disease and malnutrition, UNICEF warned.

"Authorities have already recorded nearly 20 times the monthly average of reported cases of diarrhea among children under five, in addition to increases in cases of scabies, lice, chickenpox, skin rashes and more than 160,000 cases of acute respiratory infection. "The UN Children's Fund reported.

Meanwhile, statistics in the enclave estimate that more than 19,000 Palestinians have died since the beginning of the crisis, 70 percent of them women and children.