KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — 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.

The Orphans of Gaza

“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.

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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 1,000 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.

At Least 19,000 Children are Orphaned

Using a statistical method drawn from analyzing 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 U.N. 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 Oct. 7 attack on Israel, which left about 1,200 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.

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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 labor, 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 agonizing operations, said Dr. Irfan Galaria, a plastic surgeon from Virginia who volunteered at a Gaza hospital in February.

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Aid Workers Try to Track Parents Down

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 traumatized 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.

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 Oct. 23, they were sheltering at a relative’s house when an airstrike shattered a neighboring building, according to the family. Zahra Akeila, 40, was killed alongside Fatima, their bodies dug out by relatives six hours later.

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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.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair/Samar Abu Elouf
c. 2024 The New York Times Company