Three-month-old baby Rim is the sole survivor after an Israeli military attack on the home of the Abu Hiyye family in Khan Yunis, Gaza on August 15. Orphaned by the strike, Rim has been taken in by her aunt as she faces life without her parents. Photo / Getty Images
Extended families, hospital staff and volunteers are stepping in to care for Gaza’s many newly orphaned children, some of whom are injured, traumatised and haunted by memories of their parents.
The boys are aching to see their parents again. They are convinced it will happen as soon as they can go back to Gaza City, where they were growing up before the war bulldozed that life.
“Baba and mama will be waiting for us there,” they say to their aunt Samar, who is taking care of the four of them, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Ahmed and Abdullah Akeila. They say this even though they were told their parents are dead, have been dead for months, ever since the airstrike that hit next to where the family was sheltering.
Except for Ahmed, the second youngest at 13, none of them saw the bodies. The brothers spend every passing milestone in tears, almost unable to speak – Mother’s Day was hard; so was the Eid holiday – yet still they hold out hope. Every evening when the sundown prayer is said, 9-year-old Abdullah says he can hear his mother’s voice.
Their aunt, Samar al-Jaja, 31, who shares a tent with the children in the city of Khan Younis, is at a loss. “When they see other parents holding their kids close and talking to them,” she said, “how do they feel?”
The war in the Gaza Strip is taking children from parents and parents from children, undoing the natural order of things, rupturing the basic unit of the area’s life. It is making so many orphans in such chaos that no agency or aid group can count them.
Medical staff say children are left to roam hospital hallways and fend for themselves after being rushed there bloodied and alone – “wounded child, no surviving family,” some hospitals label them. Neonatal units house babies whom no one has come to claim.
In Khan Younis, a volunteer-run camp has sprung up to shelter more than 1000 children who have lost one or both parents, including the Akeilas. One section is dedicated to “only survivors,” children who have lost their entire families, except perhaps a sibling. There is a long waiting list.
Amid the bombing, the constant pell-mell evacuations from tent to tent and apartment to hospital to shelter, no one can say how many children have lost track of their parents, and how many have lost them for good.
Using a statistical method drawn from analysing other wars, United Nations experts estimate that at least 19,000 children are now surviving apart from their parents, whether with relatives, with other caretakers or on their own.
But the true figure is probably higher. Those other wars did not involve this much bombing and this much displacement in such a small and crowded place, with a population that includes such a high proportion of children, said Jonathan Crickx, a spokesperson for the UN children’s agency.
The Israeli military says it takes precautions to limit harm to civilians in its devastating campaign in Gaza to eradicate Hamas over the group’s October 7 attack on Israel, which left about 1200 people dead and roughly 250 taken hostage. More than 100 captives still remain in Gaza, at least 30 of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel accuses Hamas of endangering Gaza residents by operating in their midst. Hamas defends its use of civilian clothes and civilian homes, saying its members have no alternative.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed: many of them children, many parents. In April, 41% of families Crickx’s agency surveyed in Gaza were caring for children not their own.
A few children have been born orphans, after their wounded mothers died during labour, said Dr Deborah Harrington, a British obstetrician who saw two babies born that way while volunteering in Gaza in December.
Far more often, children and parents are sundered when Israeli forces arrest parents, or after an airstrike, the children are rushed to hospitals alone in the confusion.
Doctors say they have treated many newly orphaned children, many of them amputees.
“There was no one there to hold their hand, no one there to give them comfort” during the agonising operations, said Dr Irfan Galaria, a plastic surgeon from Virginia who volunteered at a Gaza hospital in February.
Aid workers try to track down parents, if they are alive, or relatives. But government systems that could have helped have collapsed. Communications are spotty. Evacuation orders split up family trees, sending the splinters in all directions.
Some young children are so traumatised that they go mute and cannot give their names, making the search near-impossible, according to SOS Children’s Villages, an aid group that runs a Gaza orphanage.
Then there is Mennat-Allah Salah, 11, who talks constantly about her parents. Orphaned in December, she copies the way her mother laughed, winked, walked. She wears her mother’s sneakers and favourite T-shirt, too big though they are.
“My mum,” she said, “was everything to me,” and tears came, and she could not go on.
Among the premature babies who arrived at the Emirati Hospital in the southern city of Rafah in November was a 3-week-old girl whose family was unknown. Her file said she had been found next to a Gaza City mosque after an airstrike that killed dozens of people, according to Amal Abu Khatleh, a neonatal nurse at the hospital. The staff called her “Majhoul,” Arabic for “unidentified”.
Upset by the starkness of that name, Abu Khatleh decided to give her a proper one: Malak, or “angel”. She called journalists in northern Gaza to find out which families had lost members in a strike near where Malak was found, then questioned patients with those surnames about a missing baby girl. No luck.
In January, worried about Malak’s development, Abu Khatleh took her home.
As in other Muslim societies, religious strictures make legal adoption impossible in Gaza, though people can take in and financially sponsor orphans. Yet Abu Khatleh’s family, friends and colleagues rallied around her, donating clothes, formula and diapers.
Unless she finds Malak’s parents, she said, she plans to keep her, despite the legal hurdles.
“I feel Malak is my real daughter,” she said. “I love her. My friends even say she looks like me now.”
In most instances, aid officials say, Gaza’s close-knit extended families step in as caretakers. So it went with the Akeila brothers.
Their aunt, al-Jaja, told the story: There were seven of them, the father, a tailor, the mother, who stayed at home, their four sons and their baby daughter, Fatima.
On October 23, they were sheltering at a relative’s house when an airstrike shattered a neighbouring building, according to the family. Zahra Akeila, 40, was killed alongside Fatima, their bodies dug out by relatives six hours later.
Al-Jaja wept for her sister, she recalled. But Ahmed, the only child there to see his mother’s body in her coffin, stayed dry-eyed and silent with shock.
His eldest brother, Mohammed, 21, has been developmentally disabled since birth. The family lied to him at first, saying his mother was in surgery. Mahmoud, 19, who was badly injured in his right leg, was sent to another hospital before they could tell him.
Abdullah, the youngest at 9, was still being treated when they buried her. Hours before the strike, he remembered her making them dinner, handing them juice and chips, promising a few shekels’ allowance; he remembered hearing a boom, remembered her ushering them away from the windows.
The next thing he knew, he said, he was waking up in the hospital. When he would not stop asking about his mother, relatives finally told him, “Mama is in heaven now,” al-Jaja said.
Another few days, and the children’s father, Mohammed Kamel Akeila, 44, who had been hanging on in intensive care, was dead.
Israel’s military said that the building next to the Akeilas’ shelter that it struck had been Hamas “infrastructure,” without giving details.
Al-Jaja soon left her fiance in another city to live with the boys. Even after she marries, she said, she and the boys’ uncle will help their grandparents raise them.
“These children’s future is nothing without their parents,” she said. But they would try: “Their mother was such a kind person. Now we have to pay back all the good things she did for us.”
The camp provides some meals and cash. As everyone struggles for survival, however, UN social workers have seen a few families in Gaza prioritise their own children over orphaned relatives, Crickx said. And orphans are highly vulnerable to exploitation, violence and abuse.
If they make it to peacetime, shelter, clean water and mental and physical health care will be doubtful, to say nothing of their education, job and marriage prospects.
Even for children who still have parents, postwar Gaza will be a difficult place to grow up, said Mahmoud Kalakh, a charity worker who founded the orphans’ camp.
“So what about these children who have no source of income or provider, having lost their fathers or mothers?” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair
Photographs by: Samar Abu Elouf
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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