GAZA: A spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Margaret Harris, has said that increasing numbers of children in Gaza are on the “brink of death” from acute hunger.

“What doctors and medical staff are telling us is more and more they are seeing the effects of starvation; they’re seeing newborn babies simply dying because they [are] too low birth weight,” Harris told reporters in Geneva.

“Increasingly, we’re seeing children that are at the point, brink of death that need re-feeding,” she said.

Medical teams in Gaza have also been admitting increasing numbers of dangerously underweight pregnant women, she said, the kind of complications that happen “if you’re trying to carry a pregnancy and you lack the nutrition,” she said, adding that the hunger crisis in Gaza was purely a result of conflict and “entirely man-made”.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will host Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant next week for a bilateral meeting at the U.S. Defense Department, an American defense official, Reuters reports.

The meeting comes after Austin recently invited Gallant for a visit and is separate from Monday’s announcement that followed a call between President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who agreed to send a team of senior officials to Washington to discuss developments regarding the war in Gaza, the official added.