JERUSALEM: A year of nearly non-stop violence has reduced the 2.4 million people living in Gaza to a humanitarian catastrophe, and children in the besieged enclave are the most affected, according to a Unicef interview.

Jonathan Crickx, the UN agency spokesman for the Palestinian territories, snapped this month from a week’s assignment in Gaza and remained heavily affected despite Israel‘s redirection of its military from Gaza to Lebanon. He spoke of children in Gaza who have not attended school since the Israel-Hamas war started on October 7.

“You have children who are not permitted to have a life with normal kids, their education is taken away, their playtime, their happiness,” Crickx said. “This is so sad,” stated Scheper-Hughes, describing the look on the children’s faces, “Their faces are… so sad.” The majority of children this man observed in contentious Palestinian province were assisting their parents since they were not in classes.

“So many children are moving around with these dirty yellow plastic jerrycans now containing up to 25 liters of water,” he said. “I’ve seen children pushing these jerrycans with a broken wheelchair, struggling to bring water – one of the main challenges… in the Gaza Strip,” Crickx said it was painful to watch kids, even five or six-year-olds, looking for food for the family.

They are “wading in huge piles of garbage and struggling to get what they can find for themselves,” he said. “These children are too so affected by the violence and the bombings and insecurity they have experienced for a year.” ‘They want to go to school’

Remembering his conversation with Ahmad, one of the participants, a ten year old Gazan boy with his family living in a displacement camp in southern Gaza. The boy’s uncle had had a horrible death, Crickx said to me.

People who saw Ahmad were heard to be saying things that a 10-year-old should not tell you, how the body was in pieces, how the head was far away, he said. “This is very much hard-core, and I am shivering just withgoosebumpss hearing this from a 10-year-old child.” Almost half of the children in the Gaza Strip have some form of disability, and 20 percent have at least one parentless, according to Crickx.

The actual numbers are not known; “however, the number of times one comes across such children is quite often,” he commented. Nineteen thousand children are either unaccompanied or separated from their parents, Unicef approximated, he said.

Only a few schools today are operating across Gaza, he added, and the conflict has damaged 85% of all school facilities. “There I have the population of all the school-aged children who never attended any class in the last year,” Crickx said.

“That is something that really stands out; how they want to go to school, how they want to play with friends, to see teachers… education learning offers hope.”