The following is the transcript of an interview with Save the Children president and CEO Janti Soeripto on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” that aired on Jan. 19, 2025.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Good morning to you.
SAVE THE CHILDREN PRESIDENT AND CEO JANTI SOERIPTO: Good morning, Margaret.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You have teams inside of Gaza. We just heard from Brett McGurk, as many as 800 trucks ready to go into Gaza. Have any of yours actually made it in yet?
JANTI SOERIPTO: Not as of 10 minutes ago, Margaret, we have 60 trucks waiting in that queue, all loaded up with warm clothing, shoes for kids, pallets with medicines, malnutrition treatment, which is sorely needed. We haven’t, as yet, seen any go in, but that could have happened over the last couple of minutes.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And it’s incredibly difficult just to get in through the security screenings. I think the peak has been 200 or so trucks per day. So to scale up to 800 is pretty incredible, if they can pull that off. But when- when I look at some of these statistics, they are just, just jaw dropping. 1.1 million kids in Gaza, half the population, need food. Their urgent need, surviving on one meal a day after 15 months of war. What state are these kids in?
SOERIPTO: Oh, we- there’s estimates that there’s about 300,000 children in real acute need of malnutrition treatment. This is not just food, right? This is a medical treatment to make sure that they don’t get real long-term consequences of their malnutrition, cognitive as well as physical. There are 150,000 pregnant and lactating women inside of Gaza who urgently need micronutrient- nutrients as well to avoid those same consequences. So the needs are enormous.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I read, and this was particularly heartbreaking, that Save the Children is also going to try to connect more than 17,000 separated children to find family members.
SOERIPTO: That’s right, it’s going to be a huge effort. You know, It’s a real moment of hope and peril at the same time. We know–
MARGARET BRENNAN: How do you do that?
SOERIPTO: Well, what we’ll do is to- we do family tracing. So we’re going to try to find extended family even- even if not direct parents, extended families, aunts, uncles, nephews, neighbors, sometimes the community where they were, find members from that community, vet them, check backgrounds, and then the painstaking process of reuniting these children, who many of whom have been either displaced or lost or and some even displaced outside of Gaza, help them reconnect to that community. Lot of mental health, psychosocial support, cash to make sure that the family is also able to care for them in already a situation of- where they most of them will have lost everything. So it’s a long and hard, painstaking process that also needs real sensitive and professional social workers.
MARGARET BRENNAN: When Will those professionals be able to get in?
SOERIPTO: Well, we hope, as soon as possible–
MARGARET BRENNAN: In phase one?
SOERIPTO: In- that is the real ask and hope–
MARGARET BRENNAN: In the next six weeks.
SOERIPTO: –We need urgently to get in pediatric medical workers. We need those social workers in the case management workers for to protect children. We need a refreshment. We have two- a workforce of 250 Palestinians in Gaza who’ve been at it for 15 months. They are exhausted. They also need to get back to their, whatever’s left of their homes. We originally need to be able to surge in adequate capacity and specialism.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So, Hamas is not going to govern Gaza. They’re not governing Gaza now. It’s- it’s largely chaos. How, practically speaking, can you get all these things done if, as is now Israeli law, the largest organization, UNRWA, is now going to be banned if the UN can’t do this through the UNRWA, who does this?
SOERIPTO: That is going to be problematic. The operational infrastructure from UNRWA is massive, and we’ve said that now for 15 months, all of us, our humanitarian agencies, cannot replace UNRWA just like that, if ever. 13,000 UNRWA staff inside of Gaza–
MARGARET BRENNAN: Schools.
SOERIPTO: –schools, warehouses, trucks, everything that are being used also by organizations like ours, so that will be difficult, and we would hope that there will be certain exemptions to allow for that operational effectiveness to happen.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Because it would be illegal for you to do any work with them.
SOERIPTO: Yeah, right.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You have a tremendous amount of work, Janti Soeripto, ahead of you. Thank you very much for sharing with us. And I know you’ve been working in California as well with children out there.
SOERIPTO: As well, yeah, well, we try to be there for kids wherever the crisis hits.
MARGARET BRENNAN: All right. Thank you. We’ll be right back.
