Gaza’s homeless children: ‘A heartbreaking story of grief’
Infants and children are the biggest victims of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip. They are at the forefront of the number of martyrs, whose number approached 30,000. Those of them who survived martyrdom in bombing died of hunger or disease, or live in starvation and oppression after the death of their family and relatives in harsh living conditions.
Half of the 2 million people who fled their homes and sought refuge in the Gaza Strip after Israel’s military offensive began are children. The United Nations Children’s Organization (UNICEF) estimates that about 17,000 children have lost their parents.
UNICEF spokesman Jonathan Kirks visited Gaza in early February. All the children he met or talked to during this time had lost a family member.
He also spoke to a girl whose mother, father, two sisters and brother were killed by bombing in the early weeks of the war. She was with her family at her uncle’s house when the incident took place. One of his legs was severely injured and had to be amputated.
At an orphanage, he met two cousins, aged six and four, whose entire families had perished in the first two weeks of December. Among them, the four-year-old girl was still in a state of shock.
Families facing acute shortages of food, water or shelter facilities and difficulties in caring for their children face difficulties in caring for the children of their relatives who have died in the war.
Children’s mental health has been badly affected by war. Extreme fear, loss of appetite and sleeplessness are prominent symptoms. Hearing the sounds of bomb blasts, they get emotional shock or terror.
Even before this war, more than 500,000 children in Gaza needed mental and psychological health support. It is estimated that more than 1 million children are now in need of this assistance.
“No child, regardless of religion, nationality, language or race, should face the level of violence that occurred on or after October 7”, says Jonathan Kirks, UNICEF Senior Spokesperson for the Palestinian Territories.
In February the Ministry of Health in Gaza said that the number of victims of Israel’s ongoing aggression against the Strip reached 29,606 martyrs since October 7, while 69,737 others were injured.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics recorded in its latest update two days ago that the number of infants and children martyrs as a result of the Israeli bombing reached 12,660 martyrs, at least of course because the occupation’s bombing does not stop around the clock on the sites to which the people of the northern and central Gaza Strip were displaced, in the south and in the city Rafah.
