"We had a 14-year-old girl just walk out of some war zone of Gaza City, stunned, mute, bloodied, and she absolutely had no one,” says James Elder, Unicef’s chief spokesperson, who spent weeks in Gaza under bombardment. “How many other children are like that right now? We simply don’t know.”
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Since then, he has stayed with different family members, moving on when it was their neighbourhood’s turn to get bombed, eventually making his way to a cousin and his aunt in Rafah.
The numbers of Gaza’s dead, wounded and orphaned children are uncertain but there is no question they have borne the brunt of the war, launched after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people.
Another child, a 14-year-old boy called Kareem, recalled how his mother promised him she would make sure that the family stayed close under the relentless Israeli bombardment, so if the worst happened they would at least die together.
It was a promise she would break on 3 December when she and Kareem’s father were killed in the bombing of a relative’s house in the Sabra district of Gaza City.
Roa’a Alshafie, aged 13, had moved to southern Gaza with her mother, while her father stayed behind close to the family home in the north.
Her father died two days later in a blast at the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahiya in the north, leaving her two surviving brothers and two sisters as orphans, living with relatives in southern Gaza.
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