RAFAH: When seven-year-old Laila Al Sultan wakes up at night, she shouts for her father, killed in the same Israeli air strike that injured her leg in Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

The bombings have deprived thousands of Palestinian children of one or both parents.

She and her four-year-old brother Khaled roll around on the floor of the shanty they now live in amid a tent city of homeless people, facing up to a life with no father as their mother struggles to cope in the rubble of a ruined enclave.

“The house collapsed on us and Daddy went to heaven and he is very happy,” said Khaled, bouncing up and down on Laila’s lap as they sat.

Three months of bombardment have been devastating for the children of Gaza. Health authorities in the Hamas-run territory have estimated that about 40 per cent of those confirmed killed, a figure they now put at 23,357, were aged under 18.

Most of those who survive have lost their homes. They live in shelters in schools, in tents or shanties, or crammed into still-standing houses, whole families living in single rooms. With very little food in Gaza, children are always hungry.

“We are still unable to count the numbers, but we have initial estimates of thousands of orphans. The figures are high and the challenges are big,” said Ahmed Majdalani, the Palestinian Social Development Minister in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Laila has an ungainly metal brace attached to her injured leg and scars on her face and foot. The children play among the lines of laundry strung between tents on the sand of Rafah.

The hardship — and fear in a conflict where intense Israeli bombing of civilian areas continues — is made worse by their sadness.

Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2024