“I’m awake because my son Mohamed, 15, can’t sleep. Some time ago my daughter Salma asked me to cover her ears with my hands so that she could hear the bombs less and feel safer. And my little Sara, 12 years old, has completely lost her appetite. She vomits what little she eats and just wants to be alone.” It’s two o’clock in the morning in Gaza. Najwa finally has an internet connection and has charged her phone thanks to her neighbor’s batteries. This Palestinian woman, an employee of an international humanitarian organization, is 51 years old, does not want to give her last name and responds to this newspaper via WhatsApp from her home in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the center of the Gaza Strip. It is an area where the Israeli army has asked civilians to concentrate for security reasons, but bombardments continue.
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Najwa lives with her husband and three of her five children and has hosted three other families with seven children between the ages of 1 and 10 in her home in recent weeks. “As a mother, it hurts me not to be able to reassure them or promise them that everything will be okay. They tell me that they are hungry and I can’t always give them a plate of hot food or soft bread, they are scared at night and I can’t turn on the light to calm them down because there is no electricity and we live in Dark,” he explains.
According to calculations by the NGO Save The Children, a child dies every ten minutes in the war in Gaza. Most of the nearly 4,000 deceased minors out of a total of more than 9,000 Palestinian victims have neither names nor stories. They are corpses pulled from the rubble like broken dolls; small lifeless bodies carried in the arms of desperate parents to hospitals that are virtually no longer in operation; or small bundles in white plastic bags waiting to be identified and buried. “How many trucks do we need in Gaza to transport more than 3,300 coffins for children?” the NGO asked this week. Since then, the number of victims has increased.
“It breaks my heart to watch my children’s dreams fade.”
Najwa, Palestinian mother
More than 7,000 children were injured after the bombings and some of them had to undergo surgery or amputation with light sedation because anesthesia was no longer available. In addition, according to Palestinian sources, more than 1,000 people are missing, presumably among the ruins of the place where they had sought refuge. The rest of Gaza’s minors, who make up almost half of the more than two million residents, are kept in their homes or other people’s homes, in schools or hospitals. In Gaza there is no home without children. But right now it’s very difficult, almost impossible, to reach them or their parents remotely, in a strip with no electricity and few phone and internet connections, where foreign journalists aren’t allowed in and local reporters work piecework, sacrificing their lives put at risk. every minute. According to calculations by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 36 of them died as a result of the bombs.
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hunger and thirst
“Am I alive?” a bloodied seven-year-old boy urgently asks the doctor who treats him after he was injured in a bomb attack. “Of course, of course, you are alive,” the doctor replies. The image summarizes the cruelty of these bombings and leaves no argument unanswered. It was recorded by Belal Mortaja, a Palestinian cameraman who has been documenting events in Gaza for days, focusing particularly on the suffering of children, which is unimaginable from a distance.
Children are hungry and thirsty too. In the Hamdan family, who are staying in Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip and are hoping to be evacuated because they all have Spanish nationality, there are three small children between the ages of three months and three years. Two weeks ago, they left their home in minutes, with virtually no luggage, fleeing a bomb attack that destroyed their home. “My sister is desperate. There is no suitable water for bottle making and the baby is not eating as he should. Even under these circumstances, they will not be able to find a doctor and it would be dangerous to leave the house. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s starting to get cold in Gaza and the children don’t have warm clothes,” explains Ahmed Hamdan, the babies’ uncle, who is in Spain, on the phone.
A Palestinian carries an injured girl in a bomb attack in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 26.MOHAMMED SALEM (Portal)
Najwa’s biggest concern is also water. She and her husband set out around five a.m. to see where they could buy it or get a few barrels so they could make and boil milk and tea. “Of course we don’t bathe and that undermines morale. Also that of the children,” he emphasizes.
“They are charming, intelligent children… They like to live, have fun, dance and sing. They deserve much more than this life where we only care about survival. “It breaks my heart to see my children’s dreams fade,” says Najwa, reciting as if in a litany: Salma wanted to become a lawyer, “but now she has lost interest in everything,” Sara dreams of playing learn piano and Mohamed explains that at the moment he just wants to “survive and leave Gaza to find a life somewhere else”.
“It’s terrible that they’re experiencing this, but nobody cares about human rights, humanitarian law, democracy… It’s all a lie.” “Our children are being massacred in front of this damned world,” she says, irritated, but feeling defiant happy with everything. “It gives me goosebumps when I think of families like ours, lying under the rubble and dead…”.
“We returned to the caves”
From Khan Yunis, also in the south of the Strip, Kayan sends a few photos of his meal of the day. The wood they collect from the street is turned into firewood and they place a casserole of tomatoes and eggplants on a rusty iron fence. “We have no gas, we have returned to the caves,” says this teacher, mother of four children between 5 and 15 years old, who are staying in a relative’s house where a total of 40 people live, almost half of them minors. “We parents take action at dawn, get a number and go to an open bakery. Or in several. They give us 15 rations of bread and that’s not enough for so many people. We have to go to at least two bakeries, which is risky because they will be bombed. “My husband or I leave the house in case something happens so that one of us is safe,” she explains.
The woman also explains that after the bombs they feel a kind of gas that “burns their eyes, nose and throat” and especially affects the little ones. “The days seem to last forever. I find it difficult to play with them, I have no morals,” she admits, explaining that her youngest daughter Manal cannot be left alone for a moment because of the fear she feels and screams for her when she is not in view is.
Even before this offensive, the Palestinian psychiatrist Yasser Abu Jamei, director of the only psychiatric center in Gaza that focuses on children, warned of the psychological deterioration suffered by minors in Gaza, of the fear that affects them when they are separated from their parents are separated. the disorders that are important for their behavior or increased suicidal thoughts. This doctor and other NGOs have also warned that their parents and caregivers in the Strip are losing self-confidence and believe that they cannot protect them or properly guide them on their journey into adulthood due to the constant poverty and violence. In 2022, Save The Children warned in a report that four out of five children in Gaza were living with depression, anxiety and grief, and that the numbers were worsening due to the Israeli blockade in place since 2007.
“I’m thinking about the first day I can go back to class when this is all over. How can I stand in front of my students and convey life to them when our souls are full of death? asked Gaza professor Talal Abu Shawish in an interview with this newspaper.
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