Children Shot By Quadcopters’: UNICEF Spokesperson in Gaza

In this interview, UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder and Mehdi Hasan discuss the blocking of aid, the siege over Gaza, and the surge of child illness and trauma in the region, describing what Israel has done in Gaza as ‘the worst of humanity.’

“People in the North – I was with them yesterday. There’s not a choice here… the idea that your grandfather is in a wheelchair. You don’t have the money to get to the South,” UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder says to Mehdi as he joins from Gaza. “You also know very clearly that so-called safe zones have been struck dozens of times by air attacks.”

During the interview, Elder describes harrowing scenes of children dying right in front of him.

“I was outside at al-Aqsa Hospital in the middle area, Deir al-Balah. It was a room full of children, four or five children, all who’d been shot by quadcopters,” Elder tells Mehdi.

Mehdi and Elder discuss Israel’s deliberate starvation campaign in Gaza, with Elder telling Mehdi that the lack of food in Gaza “is not to do with logistics, this is politics.”

“Absolutely preventable,” Elder says to Mehdi. “Everything they [Palestinians] need is a few miles away. People are eating at nice restaurants 20, 30 miles away. So yeah, this famine was entirely, entirely man-made.”

Elder explains how Israeli checkpoints are hindering aid deliveries, what he makes of Western nations recognizing Palestinian statehood at the UN, and whether donations to UNICEF are still useful in the midst of Israel’s blockade.