The number of registered orphans in the territory [GAZA, Palestine] has risen to 65,279, including 54,468 children who it said lost one or both parents during the war.

Children are seen as displaced Palestinian families live in makeshift tents and severely damaged buildings amidst heavy destruction after Israeli airstrikes that left Khan Yunis in ruins, southern Gaza Strip, Palestine on July 17, 2026. [Abed Rahim Khatib – Anadolu Agency]

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Gaza Ministry of Social Development reports increase in number of registered orphans

July 24, 2026 at 9:13 am

The Ministry of Social Development in Gaza said on Thursday that the number of registered orphans in the territory has risen to 65,279, including 54,468 children who it said lost one or both parents during the war.

In a statement, the ministry said 2,039 children had been added to its records after 10th  October 2025.

The ministry also reported that the number of registered widows had reached 28,224, including 742 women who were widowed during the same period.

According to the ministry, the figures reflect a worsening humanitarian and social situation, which it attributed to the continued conflict, repeated displacement, and the reduction of safe areas for civilians.

The ministry said its teams had documented damage to or strikes affecting more than 20 shelters and displacement camps, resulting in more than 638 families losing their homes completely, in addition to damage to more than 163 tents.

It also reported that shrinking shelter capacity and shifting front lines had forced more than 800 newly displaced families to sleep in the open.

The ministry said shelters were no longer able to provide even minimum levels of protection and called on the international community and mediators to take urgent action to end the fighting and ensure protection for displaced civilians... READ MORE  https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20260724-gaza-ministry-of-social-development-reports-increase-in-number-of-registered-orphans/ 

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'40,000 Palestinian children in Gaza are now without parents. This is the largest orphan crisis in modern history, according to UNICEF. Israel did this. If Russia had done the same in Ukraine, the world would call it what it is — a war crime, a crime against humanity."

sarah

@sahouraxo

40,000 Palestinian children in Gaza are now without parents. This is the largest orphan crisis in modern history, according to UNICEF. Israel did this. If Russia had done the same in Ukraine, the world would call it what it is — a war crime, a crime against humanity.

 

Almost 40,000 Palestinian children in Gaza have lost one or both parents, making it the largest orphan crisis in modern history

The Cradle

@TheCradleMedia

—Nearly 40,000 children in Gaza have lost one or both parents during the genocide, creating what UNICEF has described as the largest orphan crisis in modern history. 

 

Many of these children are living with severe psychological trauma amid widespread destruction, displacement, and the collapse of basic services, with humanitarian agencies warning that support systems are overwhelmed, especially as Israel continues to block access to aid and deny petitions for children to travel for overseas medical care. 

 

Local field reports highlight that some Palestinian children now rely on elderly relatives, while others have been forced to assume responsibility for younger siblings after losing both parents. 

 

Aid officials estimate that more than 3,000 Palestinian children have been left completely orphaned in Gaza, with many families struggling to meet their emotional and financial needs as resources fall far short of demand. 

 

The crisis is unfolding alongside the near collapse of Gaza’s education system. 

 

UNRWA reports that about 94 percent of schools have been damaged or destroyed, with limited learning continuing in tents and temporary spaces. 

 

Humanitarian agencies warn that without sustained support, a generation of children faces growing up amid loss and instability that will have implications for generations to come.

 

https://x.com/TheCradleMedia/status/2026217892572803225 

 

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“I never thought I’d go on TV and beg for children not to be intentionally starved and that would be controversial.” Ms Rachel

https://youtubekids.tv/videos/miss-rachel/page/2

 Rachel Accurso

Rachel is a passionate educator who creates research-based videos to help toddlers and their families learn, bond, and thrive. Her videos infuse songs, games and nursery rhymes with strategies from experts to help children reach important milestones in the crucial early years of learning. Rachel believes all children are capable, brilliant and important. She loves learning from them and being around their contagious joy and wonder. 

 Rachel has two master’s degrees in education. She has one in early childhood development and one in music education. She is an advocate for children’s rights and works to ensure that all children have access to high quality early childhood education. She is an ambassador for Save the Children and Room to Grow.

​Her sweet little boy inspired the show and continues to inspire her work every day! She is married to the amazing, Mr. Aron, AKA HERBIE!     https://www.msrachel.com/

 

Ms Rachel  https://anniesnewletters.blogspot.com/search?q=Ms+Rachel

  

 

A Palestinian child in Gaza wearing a Ms Rachel shirt

 "I want my taxes to help children, not KILL them."  Ms Rachel 

"After three hundred days of war, the UNRWA issued an analysis describing Gaza’s trauma as “chronic and unrelenting”—a collective embodiment of continuous traumatic stress disorder (C.T.S.D.), a condition that stems from living under relentless trauma. Unlike post-traumatic stress disorder, which sets in after a difficult experience, C.T.S.D. is what occurs when there is no end in sight. Gazans have adapted to chronic danger, living in a state of hypervigilance, emotional numbness, and dissociation amid the slow erasure of any imagined future. The effect on children has been especially catastrophic. "

 The Lede

The New Yorker

Treating Gaza’s Collective Trauma

In Gaza, where displaced children play a game called “air strike” and act out death, the lack of mental-health resources has become another emergency.

 

By Mohammed R. Mhawish

 

August 1, 2025

The line outside Dr. Bahzad al-Akhras’s clinic starts to assemble before sunrise, a ripple of bodies in the half-light standing barefoot or in frayed sandals, waiting for a turn at what now passes for care. His clinic is wherever it needs to be: in a corner at a shelter compound, on the move during a walk around the yard, or behind the makeshift screen of a bedsheet pulled between two poles, if the wind allows. Often, Akhras sees patients in a tented space, tucked among hundreds of other such tents in the dense sprawl of Al-Mawasi, in the southern end of the Gaza Strip.

Akhras, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, lost his home to an Israeli strike, in early 2024. He and his family have been displaced multiple times, living in tents where the canvas sweats from too many bodies pressed into too little space. He no longer sits in a white-walled office or wears a badge. But he continues to work, seeing some fifty patients a day, most of them children. One of his regular patients is a young girl, no older than fourteen, who survived a strike that killed her entire family. She woke up in an I.C.U., alone, unable to understand where everyone had gone. Now she sits in front of Akhras in silence, until she asks, again and again, if he can bring them back. He has no answer, only a pencil stub and a coloring book, which he hopes she can use to express and process her emotions... READ MORE  https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/treating-gazas-collective-trauma#intcid=_the-new-yorker-homepage-bkt-a_e781db88-9438-4a28-9a85-6d91dd327556_cygnus-personalized

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Before & After

Gaza

 

There was once a city called Rafah

"Israel kills a child in Gaza every 45 minutes."... Gaza's stolen childhood: Who were the thousands of children Israel killed?

By Mohamed A. Hussein and Mohammed Haddad

Published On 26 Mar 202526 Mar 2025 (Al Jazeera)

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2025/3/26/gazas-stolen-childhood-the-thousands-of-children-israel-killed

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Israel kills a child in Gaza every 45 minutes.

That is an average of 30 children killed every day over the past 535 days. ​

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed at least 17,400 children, including 15,600 who have been identified. Many more remain buried under the rubble, most presumed dead.

Many of the surviving children have endured the trauma of multiple wars, and all of them have spent their lives under the oppressive shadow of an Israeli blockade, affecting every aspect of their existence from birth.

What is left of Gaza’s children?

About half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are children.

Over the past 17 months, Israeli attacks have left their homes in ruins, destroyed their schools, and overwhelmed their healthcare facilities.

To put this in perspective, if you had a room of 100 children:

• 2 have been killed
• 2 are missing, presumed dead
• 3 have been wounded, many critically
• 5 have been orphaned or separated from their parents
• 5 require treatment for acute malnutrition

The rest of the children bear the invisible scars of war, trauma that affects their mental health, safety and future.

Who were these children Israel killed?

They were the sons and daughters of Gaza, each with a life that should have been filled with innocence and the joy of childhood.

Among the documented children killed, there were -

• at least 825 babies, not yet old enough to celebrate their first birthday
• 895 one-year-olds, killed before they could take their first steps
• 3,266 who died as preschoolers aged two to five, deprived of play, discovery and the simple wonders of growing up
• 4,032 who died aged six to 10, leaving behind empty classrooms and school uniforms that were hardly worn
• 3,646 who died aged 11 to 14, middle schoolers who had lived through three wars (2012, 2014, 2021), but were killed in the fourth
• and 2,949 who were 15 to 17, at the age when they were preparing to step into the world, leaving behind dreams of independence and futures never realised; the 17-year-olds lived through four wars (2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021), and were killed in the fifth
• 8,899 who were sons and 6,714 were daughters
  

 

READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2025/3/26/gazas-stolen-childhood-the-thousands-of-children-israel-killed

 

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+13,319 children killed in Gaza [PALESTINE] +35,055 children lost one/both parents in past year +1M children deeply traumatized .... End this war on innocent children

Kent Page

@KentPage

+13,319 children killed in Gaza [PALESTINE]

+35,055 children lost one/both parents in past year  

+1M children deeply traumatized 85% of schools directly hit/damaged  

 

237  @UNRWAcolleagues killed  

 

End this war on innocent children

 

 #CeasefireNow

@unrwa

UNWRA: 17,000 children orphaned in Gaza

 

The plight of Gaza’s ‘WCNSFs’ – wounded child, no surviving family: "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"

"“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.”" 

"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."

The plight of Gaza’s ‘WCNSFs’ – wounded child, no surviving family

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/22/the-plight-of-gazas-wcnsfs-wounded-child-no-surviving-family

A chilling acronym used by aid workers reflects the reality of a conflict in which 40% of casualties are believed to be minors

by Nedal Samir Hamdouna and Aseel Mousa in Gaza, and Julian Borger in Jerusalem

Fri 22 Dec 2023 00.00 EST

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...  READ MORE

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Donia had lost her parents and two siblings in an Israeli strike. She was getting treatment in the hospital after she lost her leg in a previous Israeli strike when she was killed by yet another Israeli shelling.

Donia Abu Mohsen

  

The young Palestinian who was killed by Israel's shelling of another hospital in Gaza is Donia Abu Mohsen.

Donia had lost her parents and two siblings in an earlier Israeli air strike on her family home.  She was getting treatment in the Naser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis because she lost her leg in a that Israeli strike on her family home in Gaza. 

This young girl and her family deserved to live, to love, to laugh and run and be free. Instead they were trapped in Gaza- victims of Israel's genocidal war on Palestine. 

 

UNICIF: She dreamed of becoming a lawyer. "I feel injustice; when I grow up, I will be a lawyer so that I can enjoy my rights and the rights of all children" 

Children urgently need a lasting humanitarian ceasefire. Now. 

If Americans Knew- The number of motherless, fatherless babies and children in Gaza is skyrocketing.

If Americans Knew

@ifamericansknew

 

Initial figures indicate that 24,000-25,000 Palestinian children in Gaza have become orphans as a result of Israel’s bombing campaign, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said.

 

 

 

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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world's major sources of instability. Americans are directly connected to this conflict, and increasingly imperiled by its devastation.

It is the goal of If Americans Knew to provide full and accurate information on this critical issue, and on our power – and duty – to bring a resolution.

 https://ifamericansknew.org/

During the past fiscal year, the U.S. has been providing Israel with at least $10.7 million per day in military aid