‘A curse of being a parent in Gaza’: More than 3,600 Palestinian children killed in just three weeks of war
More children have been killed in Gaza in just over three weeks than in all the world’s conflicts combined in the past three years, according to global charity Save the Children.
DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: More than 3,600 Palestinian children were killed in the first 25 days of the war between Israel and Hamas, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. Hit by airstrikes, destroyed by misfired missiles, burned by explosions and crushed by buildings, they included newborns and toddlers, avid readers, aspiring journalists and boys who thought they would be safe in a church.
Nearly half of the busy strip’s 2.3 million residents are under the age of 18, and children account for 40% of those killed in the war so far. An Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data released last week found that as of October 26, 2,001 children aged 12 and younger had been killed, including 615 who were 3 years old or younger.
“When houses are destroyed, they collapse on the heads of children,” writer Adam al-Madhoun said on Wednesday as he comforted his four-year-old daughter Kenzi at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah. She survived an air raid that ripped off her right arm, crushed her left leg and fractured her skull.
Israel says its airstrikes are targeting Hamas militant sites and infrastructure, accusing the group of using civilians as human shields. It also said more than 500 militant rockets misfired and landed in Gaza, killing an unknown number of Palestinians.
More children have been killed in Gaza in just over three weeks than in all the world’s conflicts combined in the past three years, according to global charity Save the Children. For example, 2,985 children were killed in twenty war zones last year.
“Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children,” said James Elder, spokesman for UNICEF, the UN children’s agency.
Images and images of shell-shocked children being pulled from the rubble in Gaza or writhing on filthy hospital stretchers have become commonplace and have fueled protests around the world. Scenes from recent air raids included a rescuer cradling a limp toddler in a bloody white tutu, a bespectacled father screaming as he hugged his dead child tightly to his chest, and a dazed little boy covered in blood and dust staggering alone through the ruins.
“It’s a curse to be a parent in Gaza,” said Ahmed Modawikh, a 40-year-old carpenter from Gaza City whose life was shattered by the death of his 8-year-old daughter during five days of fighting in May.
Israeli children have also been murdered. During Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel that sparked the war, the gunmen killed more than 1,400 people. They included babies and other small children, Israeli officials said, although they did not give exact figures. About 30 children were also among the approximately 240 hostages taken by Hamas.
As Israeli warplanes bomb Gaza, Palestinian children huddle with large families in apartments or UN-run shelters. Although Israel has urged Palestinians to leave northern Gaza for southern Gaza, nowhere in the area has proven safe from the airstrikes.
“People flee from death only to find death,” said Yasmine Jouda, who lost 68 family members in airstrikes on October 22 that destroyed two four-story buildings in Deir al-Balah, where they had taken refuge in northern Gaza were razed to the ground.
The only survivor of the strike was Jouda’s one-year-old niece Milissa, whose mother went into labor during the attack and was found dead under the rubble, with the heads of her lifeless twin brothers emerging from her birth canal.
“What did this little baby do to deserve a life without a family?” said Jouda.
Israel blames Hamas for the death toll in Gaza – now more than 8,800, according to the Gaza Health Ministry – because the militant group operates from overcrowded residential areas. Palestinians point to the rising number of casualties as evidence that Israeli attacks are indiscriminate and disproportionate.
The war has injured more than 7,000 Palestinian children and left many with life-changing problems, doctors say.
Just before the war, Jouda’s niece Milissa walked a few steps for the first time. She will never walk again. Doctors say the airstrike that killed the girl’s family broke her spine and paralyzed her from the chest down. Down the hall, in the busy hospital in central Gaza, four-year-old Kenzi woke up screaming and asking what happened to her missing right arm.
“It’s going to take so much care and work to get her to the point where she can live a semi-normal life,” her father said.
Even those who are physically unscathed can be scarred by the ravages of war.
For 15-year-olds in Gaza, it is their fifth war between Israel and Hamas since the militant group took control of the enclave in 2007. All they have known is life under a punishing Israeli-Egyptian blockade that prevents them from traveling abroad and crushes their hopes for the future. According to the World Bank, the strip has a youth unemployment rate of 70%.
“There is no hope for these children to develop careers, improve their living standards and access better health care and education,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director for Defense for Children International in the Palestinian Territories.
But in this war, he added, “it’s about life and death.”
And in Gaza, death is everywhere.
Here are just some of the 3,648 Palestinian children and minors who died in the war.
ASEEL HASSAN, 13
Aseel Hassan was an excellent student, said her father, Hazem Bin Saeed. She devoured classical Arabic poetry, memorizing its strict meter and rhyme scheme, and relished its mystical images and flowery metaphors. During the war, when Israeli bombardments came so close that their walls shook, she regaled her relatives by reciting famous verses by Abu Al Tayyib al-Mutanabbi, a 10th century Iraqi poet, her father said.
“When I asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up, she said read,” said 42-year-old Bin Saeed. “Poems were Aseel’s escape.”
An airstrike on October 19 leveled his three-storey house in Deir al-Balah, killing Aseel and her 14-year-old brother Anas.
MAJD SOURI, 7
The explosions terrified Majd, said his father, 45-year-old Ramez Souri.
He missed playing football with his school friends. He was devastated that the war had canceled his Christian family’s long-awaited trip to Nazareth, the city in Israel where tradition says Jesus grew up.
“Baba, where can we go?” Majd asked again and again when air raids sounded. The family, devout members of Gaza’s small Christian community, finally had an answer: St. Porphyry’s Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City.
Souri said Majd calmed down when they arrived at the church, where dozens of Christian families had taken refuge. Together they prayed and sang.
On October 20, shrapnel crashed into the monastery, killing 18 people. Among the dead were Majd and his siblings, 9-year-old Julie and 15-year-old Soheil. Israel says it targeted a nearby Hamas command center.
Majd was found under the rubble with his hands around his mother’s neck. His face was completely burned.
“My children just wanted peace and stability,” Souri said, her voice cracking. “All I cared about was that they were happy.”
KENAN AND NEMAN AL-SHARIF, 18 months
Karam al-Sharif, a worker at the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency, could barely speak Wednesday as he knelt over the small, shrouded bodies of his children in the hospital. Gone were his daughters, 5-year-old Joud and 10-year-old Tasnim.
Also missing were his 18-month-old twin sons, Kenan and Neman. Al-Sharif sobbed as he hugged Kenan and said goodbye. Neman’s body was still lost under the rubble of the six-story tower where the family had taken refuge in the Nuseirat refugee camp, in central Gaza.
“They didn’t have time here,” Sami Abu Sultan, al-Sharif’s brother, said of the baby boys, a day after the building was destroyed. “It was God’s will.”
MAHMOUD DAHDOUH, 16
On October 25, Al Jazeera’s livestream captured the chilling moment when Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh discovered that an Israeli airstrike had killed his wife, 6-year-old daughter, grandson and 16-year-old son Mahmoud.
Engulfed by TV cameras in the hospital, Dahdouh cried for his teenage son and muttered, “You wanted to be a journalist.”
Mahmoud was a senior at the secular American International High School in Gaza City. He wanted to become an English-language reporter and spent his time improving camera skills and posting amateur reporting clips on YouTube, Dahdouh said.
A video Mahmoud filmed just days before his death showed charred cars, dark smoke and flattened houses. He and his sister, Kholoud, took turns delivering a monologue, doing their utmost to be heard above the wind.
“This is the fiercest and most violent war we have seen in Gaza,” Mahmoud said, punching the air with his hands.
At the end of the clip, the siblings stared straight into the camera.
“Help us to stay alive,” they said in unison.
(DeBre reported from Jerusalem.)