When Yousef al-Dawi tries to go to sleep in his aunt’s house in Rafah, he thinks about resting his head in his mother’s hands, his father taking him on outings, and most of all, learning to swim with his brother, Mahmoud – taking himself away to a world that no longer exists.
The bomb that fell on his family’s house in Jabaliya at midnight on 23 October killed his whole family and left the 10-year-old pinned under the rubble. It was three days before he regained consciousness in a hospital bed, and his surviving relatives tried to put off breaking the news to him, telling him the rest of his family were in another hospital. Eventually they had to tell him they were all dead.
Since then, he has stayed with different family members, moving on when it was their neighbourhood’s turn to get bombed, eventually making his way to a cousin and his aunt in Rafah. He is at least in a house now, and not a homemade tent like hundreds of thousands of other displaced children. But the shortage of food is the same for everyone and having a roof does not make up for the loneliness.
“When I want to sleep, I remember and dream of my mother, father and brothers, playing with me as we did before the war,” Yousef said. “I was sleeping on the hands of my mother. She was telling me beautiful stories. Now I am not as before. Before, me and my brother Mahmoud played together, and in the summer we went on a swimming course, everything was beautiful there.”
Their swimming teacher, Amjed Tantesh, has pictures of Yousef and Mahmoud in a pool in the summer, holding on to the side, their heads just above the water, Yousef in a bright blue T-shirt.
“We were planning to go on another swimming course together, but now I will go alone next year, and I put all my effort and strength into becoming a professional swimmer like Mahmoud dreamed of being,” Yousef said.
The numbers of Gaza’s dead, wounded and orphaned children are uncertain but there is no question they have borne the brunt of the war, launched after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people. Unicef, the UN’s children’s fund, estimates that minors account for at least 40% of the estimated 20,000 people killed so far.
“When we speak of a war on children, it’s not to try to be dramatic. It’s rooted in the data,” said James Elder, Unicef’s chief spokesperson, who spent weeks in Gaza under bombardment. “In ‘normal’ past conflicts, the rate was about 20%, so you’re looking at twice the number of children who have been killed and injured compared with previous conflicts.
“That speaks obviously to the severity and the intensity of the bombardment. We believe it also speaks to the indiscriminate nature of the bombardment, and it speaks to a disregard for civilians, particularly children.”
The conflict has filled hospital wards with patients classified by the abbreviation “WCNSF” – “wounded child, no surviving family”. Given the nature of Palestinian extended families, Elder says, there is usually some relative who will take in such traumatised children, but there are always exceptions.
“We had a 14-year-old girl [on Wednesday last week] just walk out of some war zone of Gaza City, stunned, mute, bloodied, and she absolutely had no one,” he said. “How many other children are like that right now? We simply don’t know.”
Another child, a 14-year-old boy called Kareem, recalled how his mother promised him she would make sure that the family stayed close under the relentless Israeli bombardment, so if the worst happened they would at least die together. It was a promise she would break on 3 December when she and Kareem’s father were killed in the bombing of a relative’s house in the Sabra district of Gaza City.
The blast maimed Kareem’s elder sister, Aya, and critically injured their brother Hassan. The oldest boy in the family, Hussein, had already been killed days earlier when the bakery he had gone to in search of bread was hit by an airstrike.
Now only Kareem and his younger brothers, Hossam and Asaad, remain – more or less unscathed, survivors but orphans.
“I was unable to bid farewell to my mother, father and brother, and no funeral was conducted for them,” Kareem said. “My mother feared the prospect of us being left alone or feeling oppressed if any of us were lost. I wish I had departed with them.
“I cannot fathom what life will be like after the loss of my family,” he said. “This pain is unbearable.”
The children are now in the house of an aunt in southern Gaza, and in their grief they must fight to survive. Finding firewood and flour or anything to eat is a daily struggle. Kareem has diabetes. After the war started, his father would risk the bombs to search for insulin and needles in pharmacies and clinics, but he is now no longer there to help forage, and insulin is ever harder to come by. Kareem’s little brother Hossam suffers from stomach cramps, which a doctor has told them comes from drinking contaminated water, but it is the only water available.
Roa’a Alshafie, aged 13, had moved to southern Gaza with her mother, while her father stayed behind close to the family home in the north. Spreading out did not spare them. Her parents were killed by separate airstrikes, a few days apart. The bombing which killed her mother also caused the death of one of her sisters and left Roa’a with injuries to her hand, back and chest. Her father died two days later in a blast at the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahiya in the north, leaving her two surviving brothers and two sisters as orphans, living with relatives in southern Gaza.
“Before the war, our life was normal. I was going to my school, meeting my friends, my parents and sister were alive, I was feeling safe. My mother was making breakfast for us before school, and my father was working to provide for us,” Roa’a recalled. “Now I can’t sleep well for thinking about my parents, my sister and the pain of my injuries. Now we are orphans. We don’t know when the war will stop.”
For Gaza’s children, there is no end in sight to the horror. Even the relatively lucky ones – those who have not been wounded and still have their parents – are at increasing risk from disease, starvation and exposure as winter approaches. Many of them are in vast camps of makeshift tents that have sprung up in Rafah and elsewhere in the south.
“There’s not enough supplies of food, there’s not enough supply of water, and there is no sanitation,” Jason Lee, the country director for Save the Children International, said by phone from Rafah.
“People have taken to open defecation in the street because there are no toilets. And, of course, children are most disproportionately impacted by this. There’s no healthcare, so they either risk facing starvation [or] dehydration, and we see the rates of gastrointestinal disease increasing.
“And winter is here,” Lee added. “Civilians are sheltering out in the open, and children will be especially susceptible to pneumonia. Pneumonia is one of the world’s greatest killers for children worldwide.”
Elder, the Unicef spokesperson, said there had been 100,000 recorded cases of acute watery diarrhoea among children, though the true numbers are likely to be much higher. Their parents are well aware that going to hospitals would be pointless, as whatever health services that remain are devoted to treating the most traumatic wounds.
“You hear time and again that we need to use whatever parenting skills we’ve got, together with hope, nature and luck,” Elder said. “There is a justified concern that you can get to a point where you start to see similar numbers of children killed through diseases as we’ve seen through bombardment. It is that dire. Things deteriorate by the day and by the hour.”
He added: “For the families, it’s about doing everything you can so your child doesn’t realise that you’ve lost control.”
