Thousands of starving Palestinian children in southern Gaza are at risk of dying before their families eyes, according to the United Nations a stark warning as Israels continued assault on Rafah cuts off access to the regions health care facilities and life-saving treatment for malnutrition.

The nearly 3,000 affected children make up about three-quarters of the Palestinian youth in southern Gaza who were estimated to have been receiving care for moderate to severe acute malnutrition before Israel expanded its military offensive into Rafah , according to reporting from nutrition partners working with the United Nations Childrens Fund, or UNICEF.

Horrific images continue to emerge from Gaza of children dying before their families eyes due to the continued lack of food, nutrition supplies and the destruction of healthcare services, Adele Khodr, UNICEFs regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement on Tuesday.

Unless treatment can be quickly resumed for these 3,000 children, they are at immediate and serious risk of becoming critically ill, acquiring life-threatening complications, and joining the growing list of boys and girls who have been killed by this senseless, man-made deprivation, she continued.

Israels deadly military offensive in Gaza has entered its ninth month after Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people and taking about 250 hostages, roughly half of whom were released late last year. Since then, Israeli forces have killed more than 37,000 people mostly women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry displaced most of Gazas population, destroyed hospitals and blocked humanitarian assistance like food and clean water from entering the enclave.

Numbers are numbing. Seeing this on the news over and over again, there is a kind of normalization that happens because people feel helpless, Dr. Audrey McMahon, a pediatric psychiatrist who worked with Gazas children, told Doctors Without Borders. But these children are human beings that have the same right to have a life lived in peace, to have access to good food, to grow healthy. They should have a right to have dreams and hope for the future.

Children are born where theyre born, and it doesnt make them belong to any type of group, she continued. They are just children.