Gaza.. Two years of genocide leave childhood bleeding orphaned and disabled
After a relative cessation of the Israeli war machine that annihilated the Gaza Strip over the course of two full years, Palestinian childhood still lives with open wounds, telling chapters of an endless tragedy, and revealing the depth of the pain left by a crushing war on small bodies and innocent souls.
War exhausted childhood
The war began on October 8, 2023, and ended on October 10, 2025, but its effects continue to haunt hundreds of thousands of children who lost their limbs, senses, or families, becoming permanent victims of genocide, siege, and hunger.
According to data from the Ministry of Health and the Government Information Office in Gaza, the number of martyrs reached about 68,643 Palestinians, including more than 20,000 children, in one of the bloodiest wars in modern history against civilians.
Among the victims were 1,015 children under one year old, and 450 infants who had no chance of survival, while 14 children died from extreme cold during the periods of displacement in tents that did not protect against cold or heat.
More than 56,000 children lost one or both of their parents, adding to a new generation of orphans besieged by loss and deprivation, in light of an acute shortage of food, medicine, and infant formula, which caused the death of 154 children due to acute malnutrition.
A generation between disability and orphanhood
With the collapse of the health system due to the comprehensive destruction of hospitals, more than 5,200 children need urgent medical evacuation to save their lives, while numbers show that there are 4,800 cases of amputation among the wounded, of which about 18 percent are children.
In a report issued by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on October 8, it confirmed that about 64,000 children in Gaza were lost or injured during the past two years, including at least a thousand infants.
“We don’t know how many children have died from preventable diseases, or are still buried under the rubble.”
She added that one million children in Gaza live today in what she described as “the most dangerous place for children in the world.”
In the same context, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities stated that at least 21,000 children in Gaza have suffered from various disabilities since the outbreak of the war, noting that more than 40,500 children have suffered injuries related to the bombing, nearly half of whom now suffer from permanent disabilities.
A fragile agreement and lingering pain
On October 10, the Hamas movement and Israel reached a ceasefire and prisoner exchange agreement, with Egyptian, Qatari and Turkish mediation and American sponsorship, ending a two-year war that resulted in massive destruction, the cost of its reconstruction estimated at about 70 billion dollars.
But despite the relative calm, the pain remains bright in the faces of the children whose wounds are still bleeding:
Childhood in Gaza today is not just a stage of life, but rather a story of collective suffering for an entire generation, which grew up among orphans, disability, and fear, in a land searching for a life after it was exhausted by a war that left nothing as it was.
