More than 6,600 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 7, according to the government media office.
Thousands more are missing under the rubble amid incessant bombardments, the statement added.
On Friday, Catherine Russell, executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund, warned that Gaza was once again “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child” following the resumption of war.
Russell said hundreds of children would die every day if violence returned to the scale and intensity seen before the seven-day pause in fighting that ended Friday.
“It doesn’t have to be this way. For seven days, there was a glimmer of hope for children in the midst of this horrible nightmare,” Russell said in a statement.
About half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are under 18. Many Palestinian minors in Gaza have been traumatized by the war, with some having suffered five Israeli assaults since 2008.
The study conducted by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics before the war began on October 7 found that 13 percent of children and minors aged five to 17 suffer from anxiety.
The bureau estimates that about 52,450 children and minors are expected to suffer from stress in 2023, while 13,000 could suffer from signs of depression.
But those numbers are expected to rise exponentially due to the October 7 War, the statistics office said.
The NGO Defense for Children International-Palestine said in early November that Israeli forces had killed twice as many Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip in October as the total number of Palestinian children killed in the occupied West Bank and Gaza combined since then. 1967.
More than 15,500 people have been killed in the besieged Palestinian territory in more than eight weeks of intense fighting and bombardment, according to the Health Ministry.
