More than 3,600 Palestinian children have died in the first 25 days of the war between Israel and Hamas, according to The Telegraph Online.
That is the figure cited by the Gaza Ministry of Health. Among the dead there were newborns and babies hoping they would be safe in a church or hospital.
Nearly half of the 2.3 million residents of the crowded Gaza Strip are under 18, and children account for 40 per cent of those killed in the war. An Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data released last week showed that 2,001 children aged 12 and under had been killed, including 615 children under 3.
On Wednesday, writer Adam al-Madhoun said:
“When houses are destroyed, they collapse on the heads of children.”
He is at the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip with his four-year-old daughter Kenzi. She miraculously survived an Israeli airstrike that ripped off her right arm, crushed her left leg and fractured her skull.
The Israeli army says its airstrikes have targeted Hamas militant targets and infrastructure. Israel accuses the group of using civilians as human shields. Israeli authorities also claim that more than 500 militant rockets have misfired and landed in Gaza, killing an unknown number of Palestinians.
According to Save the Children, an international charity organisation, more children have been killed in Gaza in three weeks than in all world conflicts combined in the past three years. Last year, for example, 2,985 children were killed in two dozen war zones. James Elder, a spokesperson for Unicef, the UN children’s agency, said:
“Gaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children.”
Photos and videos of shell-shocked children being pulled from the rubble of Gaza or squirming on filthy hospital gurneys have become commonplace and have sparked protests around the world. Footage of recent airstrikes shows a rescue worker holding a limp toddler in a bloody white tutu, a bespectacled father clutching a dead child to his chest with a scream, and a dazed boy covered in blood and dust wading alone through the rubble. Ahmed Modawikh said:
“It’s a curse to be a parent in Gaza.”
The life of a 40-year-old carpenter from Gaza City was shattered by the death of his 8-year-old daughter during five days of fighting in May this year.
