The world needs to act now to tackle Afghanistan’s growing humanitarian crisis and help the children being locked up in prisons and sold by their desperate families to buy food because they are so hungry, England’s children’s commissioner has told Sky News.

A Sky News team in the Taliban-run country has seen children as young as 12 inside Herat’s prison – and many of them have said they are there for “stealing bicycles”.

Several parents also told Sky how they have resorted to selling their kidneys – and their children – so they can feed the rest of the family.

Responding to the Sky News reports, Dame Rachel de Souza echoed former PM Gordon Brown’s calls for western countries to commit funding to help those in need through a “pledging conference”.

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Reports ‘absolutely heartbreaking’

“An international conference is the least we can do. This needs major action,” the children’s commissioner told Sky News.

“It’s absolutely heartbreaking to see those reports, but we mustn’t turn away, and I think this is one of those situations where everybody – all of us – every government, internationally, must act to support those children.

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“It’s just awful. To think of those children in the middle of winter… and the stories about selling young girls, is just awful and we really must act.”

She added: “We can’t in 2022 have children experiencing this.”

Mr Brown, who was PM from 2007 to 2010, has warned that the United Nations says $4.4bn (£3.2bn) is urgently needed and the money “must come now or Afghans will conclude the West will never help them – even in their hour of greatest need”.

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Writing for the Mirror online he said Afghanistan is “now a land all but forgotten – and our eyes have turned away as the planet’s biggest humanitarian disaster unfolds and people die, many frozen to death”.

He added: “Urgently needed aid to pay for food, healthcare and girls’ schooling is not flowing in anything like the amounts needed even as TV crews, bravely taking on the critical role journalism can play in informing the world, are exposing the scale of the catastrophe: children dying in front of our eyes from starvation or frozen to death; fathers selling their kidneys; mothers selling their babies – all in a desperate attempt to feed those still alive.”

The former prime minister was speaking after viewing a Sky News report from the Taliban-run country, showing “malnourished, horribly weak” children and a toddler who had frozen to death.

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‘The tip of the iceberg’

Several aid organisations fear millions of Afghans could starve as the winter progresses.

Responding to Alex Crawford’s Sky News report last week, Sir Mark Lowcock, a former UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said: “That graphic, compelling, heartbreaking set of stories is really the tip of the iceberg of what’s going on in Afghanistan right now.

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“The vast majority of the population are starving and that is the reason people resort to these extreme measures.

“It’s not at all appropriate to enforce a sort of collective punishment on the total population of the country because you don’t like the regime that those people haven’t chosen.”

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Reports of organ selling ‘extremely concerning’

The UK Foreign Office has now pledged an additional £97m of emergency aid for Afghanistan this winter, which the department says will provide more than 2.7 million people with food, health services and water amid a worsening crisis.

Last August, the UK government promised to double aid sent to the country, but up until now just £145 million out of the £286 million it said it would provide has been dispersed.

The latest pledge came after Baroness Amos, another former UN under-secretary-general, told Sky News that if money wasn’t urgently sent into the country, there would “be three million children under five who will face acute malnutrition by March. Of those, a million children will die.”

Foreign Secretary Liz Truss described a Sky News report showing how Afghans are resorting to desperate measures to feed themselves after the Taliban takeover as “extremely, extremely concerning”.

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