In Gaza there are now so many orphans that no agency or aid group can count them
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 Gazan 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 Gaza is taking children from parents and parents from children, undoing the natural order of things, rupturing the basic unit of Gazan 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 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. [Continue reading…]