Gaza becomes a ‘graveyard’ for children as Israel intensifies airstrikes

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip — Youssef Sharaf has been trying for more than a week to dig out the bodies of his four children, buried under his destroyed home in Gaza City.

His parents and his wife were killed in the same attack. So were his three brothers and two sisters, his two uncles and their spouses - and so many of their children.

“All the families there were civilians who were looking for a simple life,” he told The Washington Post by phone. “We thought we lived in a safe place.”

Sharaf, 38, was out distributing food to displaced Gazans on Oct. 25 when he got a call about an Israeli strike on his family’s apartment tower. He raced back but it was too late. The intensity of the blast had collapsed the multistory building.

His three daughters - Malak, 11, Yasmin, 6, and Nour, 3 - and his only son, 10-year-old Malik, were lost beneath the rubble.

“Can you imagine my pain?” he asked.

About 30 of his relatives were staying with them, Sharaf said, hoping to find safety in numbers, and in each other. Thirteen of his nieces and nephews were killed - among them Lana, 16, Hala, 11, Jana, 9, Juri, 6, Tuleen, 4, Karim, 2, and 1-year-old Obeida.

His brother had just welcomed a child after 16 years of trying with his wife. They too were killed.

“So I carried them in my hands, my brother, his wife, and his son, and buried them together,” he said.

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strike.

More than 3,700 children have been killed in Gaza since the war began on Oct. 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Families are mourning not just their own losses, but what feels like the loss of an entire generation.

Children have accounted for 2 out of every 5 civilian deaths in Gaza, according to Jason Lee, Save the Children’s director for the Palestinian territories. That does not include some 1,000 children the group estimates are still trapped under the rubble.

“We are now in a situation where one child is killed every 10 minutes,” he said.

More than 9,000 Gazans in total have died so far, the Health Ministry says, in Israel’s fifth and bloodiest war yet with Hamas, the militant group that controls the coastal enclave. The conflict began on Oct. 7, when Hamas militants rampaged through southern Israel, killing more than 1,400 people and taking more than 230 others hostage, including at least a dozen children.

“There are no winners in a war where thousands of children are killed,” the U.N. children’s rights committee said Wednesday in a statement calling for a cease-fire.

The Israel Defense Forces says it targets Hamas militants and infrastructure and has safeguards in place to prevent civilian causalities. It has disputed the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll, which does not distinguish between fighters and civilians. The IDF has accused the extremist group of hiding fighters, weapons, command centers and tunnels in residential areas.

But in just three weeks of war, the number of children killed in Gaza surpassed the total number killed across all the world’s conflict zones in any year since 2019, the global charity Save the Children said Sunday.

“Gaza has become a graveyard for children,” UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said at a news briefing Tuesday. “It’s a living hell for everyone else.”

Most Gazan children have already lived through multiple wars. Nearly half of the 2.3 million people packed into the strip - one of the world’s densest urban areas - are below age 18, according to the United Nations. Most of those born since 2007, when Hamas seized power, have never left Gaza because of an Israeli blockade imposed the same year. The majority have grown up in poverty; few have had regular access to adequate medical care, education or clean water.

The latest war has underscored just how vulnerable these children are.

They are crammed into apartment buildings with dozens of relatives, in search of safety, or hiding out in U.N. shelters and schools with thousands of others, sleeping under desks where they are meant to be learning.

Some displaced children are living on the street or in tents in makeshift camps. Everywhere in Gaza, there is a desperate lack of water, food and medicine. Dehydration and diarrhea, which can be deadly for children, are on the rise.

And then there are the Israeli airstrikes, thousands and thousands of them, which rain down day and night, from north to south, on Hamas tunnels and hideouts, but also on homes, schools and places of worship.

When wounded children are rushed to hospitals, there is less and less that doctors can do to save their lives, said Ahmed al-Farra, head of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza.

“The destructive power of the missiles is very strong,” he said of Israeli munitions. Many children arrive from attack sites with gruesome injuries - severed body parts, shrapnel wounds, severe burns and internal bleeding from the force of the blasts, he said.

Behind Farra, a child wrapped in gauze was suffering from kidney bleeding. In the next bed, a child with a brain bleed had burns all over their body.

“Ya Allah,” another child shrieked over and over. “Ya Allah.”

Nasser and Gaza’s largest hospital, al-Shifa, have both moved their maternity wards to make room for the wounded.

Across three hospitals in different parts of Gaza, doctors told The Post they have never seen children with such horrific injuries.

“I’ve worked here for more than 25 years and I’ve seen all the wars, but this war is different,” said Hussam Abu Safiya, a doctor at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.

Israel has repeatedly ordered the hospital to evacuate, but the medical staff have decided to stay with their patients.

“We are talking about hundreds of kids who need medical care or they will die in the street,” Abu Safiya said.

Shahad, 18, had dreamed of having daughters who would “grow up and become my friends.” On Aug. 18, she gave birth to twin daughters, Misk and Masa. Misk was born prematurely and spent her first month in the hospital.

She had only been home a few weeks when the war started. On the fifth day, Shahad heeded the Israeli military’s evacuation orders, fleeing with her extended family from Gaza City to Nuseirat in the south.

On Oct. 18, a strike on a neighbor’s house collapsed part of their temporary home. Misk was killed, on the day she turned 2 months old. Shahad lost her sister and cousin as well.

“There is no safety in this place,” Shahad said, speaking on the condition that she be identified by her first name to protect her security. “All of my dreams became a meaningless mirage.”

The family moved to another place in Nuseirat. Ten days later, during a more than 30-hour communications blackout in Gaza, an Israeli strike hit a nearby mosque. The blast blew through the surrounding buildings and killed three other children in the family - Lana, 9, Hassan, 8, and Rana, 6 - according to Saadia, an aunt in the family.

Saadia’s 7-year-old niece, Nouran, was disfigured by shrapnel. “We aspired for Nouran to become a doctor,” she said. “Today, we no longer know how Nouran will face herself, even in the mirror.”

“Are these the goals of the war?” Saadia asked between tears. “Our children are not numbers. They have a story worth telling.”

Berger reported from Jerusalem and Harb from London.