Some arrive at the hospital alone and injured. Others are helped by strangers who notice a child following the crowd next to them. Four and a half months of war in Gaza have resulted in around 17,000 minors being separated from their families, according to Unicef, the United Nations children's agency. Some of them are orphans, whether they know it or not; others were lost. This is only an estimate, as it is impossible to determine their exact number given the chaos that reigns in the Gaza Strip. They represent 1% of the 1.7 million displaced people, mostly concentrated in the Rafah region. Its leaders insist daily that the Israeli army will not end the war without invading. “Like all data relating to Gaza today, it is proportionately much higher than that of any other conflict in modern times,” said Hamish Young, senior emergency coordinator at Unicef.
“Many people don't know whether their parents are alive or not,” explains Ruth Conde, a Spanish pediatric nurse who returned from the southern Gaza Strip last January after volunteering for a month in various medical centers. We work with the NGO Doctors Without Borders. Some bomb attacks on houses in densely populated areas killed up to twenty members of the same family clan. In Palestine – and the Arab world in general – the family network is extensive, and it is common to add several floors to the same property so that male children become independent after marriage.
Two girls were displaced this Monday in a refugee camp in Rafah. IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA (Portal)
Some of these unaccompanied children arrive at the hospital injured and alone, emphasizes Conde. “They themselves are the ones who tell you that they are alone.” There is an English acronym to define them: WCNSF: wounded child, no surviving family. Others are brought by strangers who are already struggling to feed their own children. “They come from people saying, 'We found it when we went from Khan Yunis to Rafah and we integrated it,'” Conde recalls. “They are so anxious that we have seen self-harming behavior and even suicidal thoughts.” Even before the war, Unicef estimated that half a million people needed psychological support. Now there are a million traumatized children, after 136 days of war with nearly 30,000 Palestinians dead amid unprecedented destruction since World War II and a humanitarian crisis.
“When you're fleeing for your life,” Young explains, “it's very easy for parents to lose a child, especially if they're young or caring for multiple children at the same time.” Sometimes they have to carry a baby and multiple children at the same time pull by the hand. In these circumstances, it is very, very easy for them to separate.” Add to this ease of separation, the scale of forced displacements that Gaza has recorded and the data from similar situations in other parts of the planet, the emergency coordinator considers it for “most likely” that this is “the main reason” That is why so many minors today are not accompanied by their families. Between October and November, around a million people fled from the north to the south on army orders. In early December, after a week's ceasefire, Israel concentrated its bombing raids on the south and eventually invaded Khan Yunis, the region's capital, prompting further smaller exoduses. Sometimes these are the same people who are looking for a safe place that doesn't exist.
Vulnerable
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The most vulnerable cases are those in which no one can find a family connection, explains Young, citing as an example a four-year-old girl whom he visited several times. “He was wandering alone in the middle of a combat zone [â¦]. We took her to the hospital. She had some injuries and was extremely traumatized. For a while he couldn't even speak. Now she is well cared for and protected, both physically and psychosocially, but she only says her first name, without the last name. He can’t say what happened to him, where he comes from or who his parents are,” he says.
A group of children wait for their turn to receive food in Rafah on February 13. IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA (Portal)
When reporting on the estimated number of minors separated from families at a press conference in Geneva earlier this month, Jonathan Crickx, head of legal defense and communications at Unicef in Palestine, mentioned two other cases he had just had learned about it first hand: “I saw two very small children, six and four years old, in a center where unaccompanied minors are housed and cared for.” They are cousins and their entire families were killed in the first half of December . The four-year-old girl in particular is still in shock. I met these children in Rafah. We fear that the situation of those who have lost their parents will be much worse in the northern and central Gaza Strip.” In the north, where more cases of severe malnutrition are being recorded, humanitarian aid is not enough. The South is where the work of international organizations and NGOs is concentrated, so there is a registration process and protocol to address it.
On the one hand, there are organized shelters such as those run by the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), where they are looked after by community and sometimes social or health workers. In less organized cases, everything works more organically and without records, says Young. People ask to put them in touch with members of their family clan. In Gaza, social ties are close and neighbors usually know the patronymic of every person or figure in the area. But in the crowded chaos of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people are housed in official shelters, everything is more complicated; many others in tents and an unspecified number with relatives, out of solidarity or to pay rent for apartments or rooms.
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