Gaza- Israel claimed the lives of more than 30 Palestinian children from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip on International Children’s Day, which the United Nations designated on November 20 of each year to emphasize the need for the world to respect children’s rights.
In the Yarmouk stadium – where the displaced people who were forcibly displaced by the occupation from the northern Gaza Strip are crowded – childhood falls between the alleys of tents, children whose shoulders and minds have grown before their ages and bodies, whose faces bear the sorrow that has been stained by the life of displacement and the tragedy of starvation, and the war has placed a burden on them heavier than them, making their girls into mothers. Among their males are men.
At the door of the tent, the child Islam leans on a worn-out shoe, repairing a shoe that his palms hold. He inserts the needle and pulls it out with an effort equivalent to the weakness of his hands. Tel Aviv Tribune Net approached him and asked him about his motivation for the work he does. He replied, “I work from what I earn, and I do not want to extend it to anyone,” in response. A child no more than 11 years old. The war made him a father and breadwinner for his mother and five siblings after the occupation killed his father in December of last year.
From a child whose biggest concern was winning a football match with his peers, to a man with the body of a child sitting on a chair where displaced people flock to repair shoes.
Islam aspires to specialize in the field of automobile electricity, as his father did. He says, “When the war ends, I will return to school and learn and practice the profession that my father used to work in.”
His fatherhood also exceeded his spending to bear the burdens of his brothers and take care of them, and he confirms, “We fled from Jabalia to Gaza, with occupation tanks around us. I was afraid that my brothers would be harmed, and I did not calm down until we arrived safely.”
Luxury “right to life”
During Tel Aviv Tribune Net’s tour of the camp, she met Khaled (10 years old), who was dragging a cart heavier than him over the rough terrain, containing wood that he collected from the destroyed homes around the camp. He brought it to his mother to stoke the stove and prepare food for them. Khaled says, “We are no longer children. The difference is between us and the old women.” Gray hair only.
On the other hand, Anas (7 years old) sits with tears in the corners of his eyes, alone on the playing field after he was unable to bring his mother and siblings what would satisfy them. When Tel Aviv Tribune Net asked him about his father, he replied, “My father is trapped in Jabalia.”
As for Lubna (13 years old), she asks about the theoretical rights that she learned in the school curricula, and she tells Tel Aviv Tribune Net, “We learned that children have the right to play and be safe. Does sleeping on tent sand and our lack of anything to eat or wear in this bitter cold constitute respect for our rights?!”
Lubna carried a gallon of water and continued walking, muttering, “What is happening to us is forbidden, by God, you torture us a lot.”
In the Yarmouk camp in Gaza, school bags turned into displacement bags, and school queues in the morning turned into queues for hospice and access to water, while schools and playgrounds became shelter centers and spaces for setting up tents.
The children of the camp see wood and leaves as wealth for making fires and cooking, while they see water flowing in the taps, bathing in the tub designated for bathing, sleeping on a pillow and bed, playing, going for walks, eating meat and vegetables, and drinking milk are all luxuries that the Gazan child today does not get anything of.
“Unaccompanied” children
The occupation forces kidnapped dozens of minors from the Gaza Strip, either during their passage through the Netzarim checkpoint separating the northern and southern Gaza Valley, or during their ground operations in which they arrested thousands of Palestinians.
The Palestinian Prisoners’ Affairs Authority says that the Israeli prison administration deals with Gaza children more harshly than others. In this context, lawyer Khaled Mahajneh wrote on his personal page on social media platforms after his visit to Megiddo prison, saying, “I found a 15-year-old minor who was arrested at the Netzarim checkpoint while he was… Accompanied by his mother, he has been detained since November 2023, under the pretext that he is an irregular fighter without charges and without investigation.
As for the “unaccompanied” children, as they are known – whom the occupation releases after abducting them for hours – it pushes them to the south of the Gaza Strip, thus separating them far from their families in the north without allowing them to return.
The young man Abdullah Abu Assi and his brother, the child Omar (12 years old), were waiting together for humanitarian aid trucks in the Kuwait Roundabout area southwest of Gaza City when the occupation surprised them and arrested a large number of people there, including Abdullah, who was released by the occupation after a 12-day detention and deportation. To Rafah, while Omar was detained for hours and then released south.
Abdullah told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that after 10 days had passed, during which he did not stop tracking down his brother, he heard his name being called in the mosques, so he met him after he gave up trying to search for him.
Omar lives with his brother in a tent without his parents, relying on food from the hospice, without shelter or his mother’s embrace, and without any means of living. While Omar insists on returning to his home and his parents in the Al-Tuffah neighborhood in Gaza City, he loses the ability to express the scenes of the martyrs being trampled over and the body parts scattered in the streets that he saw during His detention, after which the ten months that passed were not enough for him to recover.
The only survivor
Displaced in shelters, languishing in prisons, or war-wounded, this is the condition of children in the Gaza Strip. In the National Arab Baptist Hospital, children are on treatment beds suffering from permanent disabilities, burns, deformities, and injuries that have led to paralysis or motor disability, and other cerebral injuries that affect perception and behavior. Hundreds of children have also been lost. Their eyesight or vision was damaged, and the war led to the amputation of 4,000 children, according to the Ministry of Health.
In the reception section, which is crowded with stories of pain from hundreds of injured children, the harshest story appears to be of paramedics carrying in their hands children weighing no more than kilograms, while on their lips they carry the heaviest thing a human being can say: “a lonely, surviving child.”
Lamees – who is no more than 7 months old – remained alone after her family members were removed from the civil registry when their home in the Al-Sabra neighborhood, south of the city, was targeted. The nurse treated her wound without a mother hugging her or a father standing next to her, making her one of 17,000 orphans who were deprived of their parents by the genocide war. And their mothers.
Outside the reception and in the courtyard of the Baptist Hospital, Aram, a displaced person in the hospital, sits every day next to her sister’s grave, planting a rose in the dirt of her grave, and telling her about the details of her day and telling her of her longing and the health condition of their injured father.
Aram says, “I miss my sister every day, and I ask: Why did they deprive me of her when she did not harm them at all?!”
Shrouded siblings
With swollen eyes and a head reeling between the truth of what she sees and what she refuses to believe, Areej sits in front of the bodies of Hamza, Abdul Aziz, and Laila, her three shrouded children, who were killed by a single missile that fell on their displacement tents in the city of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, as a result of which their bodies and Areej’s heart were disintegrated.
She feels their faces with her trembling hand and asks them, “Who will call me Mama after today? Why did you all leave?” Areej says, “Hamza was always dreaming and praying to ride a rocket to ascend to the moon and discover it. His wish came true and the rocket carried him to his Lord.”
She puts her hand on her heart, beating on it and saying, “Stay firm, stand firm, O steadfast one of reason and religion, steadfast me, O Lord.” She asks those around her, “Children are sleeping, O world, their biggest concern is playing. They woke up soaked in their own blood. What did they hurt them with to be killed?”
The Israeli army has killed more than 17,400 children to date, and UNICEF says that it “deprived 60,000 children of education as a result of the war, and left more than 500,000 children in the Gaza Strip in need of psychological and mental support.”