GAZA, (PIC)
When a child survives an Israeli bombing in Gaza, it does not mean they have emerged unharmed. They may remain alive, but the world they knew: the home, the school, the neighborhood, the mother’s voice in the morning, and the playtime, shatters all at once. This is the impact of war on the children of Gaza: not a passing event in news bulletins, but a daily path of pain, fear, displacement, and the harsh waiting for a merciless unknown.
The impact of war on Gaza’s children exceeds the moment of bombing
A superficial reading reduces a child’s suffering to a scene of blood and rubble, but the truth is broader and crueler. Israel’s aggression does not only strike the body, but it strikes the basic sense of security. The child who sleeps to the sound of occupation aircraft no longer treats the night as a time for rest, but as a time for the possibility of death. The child who sees their home turn into ruins does not just lose walls, but loses the meaning of stability itself.
In Gaza, children do not live through Israel’s aggression as an exception. Many of them were born under siege, and grew up between rounds of repeated aggression, electricity cuts, water shortages, medical supply crises, and constant threats. Therefore, the impact of the aggression here is complex. It is the impact of the direct event, and the impact of the long accumulation that makes childhood itself besieged. Among more than 70,000 martyrs in the Israeli war of genocide on the Gaza Strip, more than 21,500 children have been martyred, and more than 41,000 others were injured, while more than 8,100 citizens, including children and women, remain missing under the rubble and on the roads.
Psychological trauma – an injury invisible to the eye
The most dangerous aspect of the aggression against children is that their psychological wounds are not easily monitored like physical wounds. Children may appear silent, but internally they live in constant trembling. They may survive a raid, and then days later begin involuntary urination, temporary loss of speech, panic attacks, fear of separation from their mother, or an inability to sleep.
These are not marginal reactions. They are indicators of deep trauma. A child in war conditions loses the ability to predict what will happen, and when expectation falls, the sense of control falls with it. This reflects on behavior, emotion, concentration, and relationships within the family. Some children become more aggressive, some withdraw completely inward, and some appear older than their ages because they were forced into early maturity under fire.
A study conducted by a center specializing in mental health in the Gaza Strip revealed that 96% of children in the Gaza Strip feel that death is imminent, while 87% of children show extreme fear, and 79% of them suffer from nightmares.
The study, prepared by the Palestinian Community Training and Crisis Management Center, with support from the War Child Alliance, showed that more than a year of displacement and continuous bombing has left the most vulnerable children of the Gaza Strip suffering from acute psychological crises, as their families have become on the edge of collapse.
The study included interviews with 504 families, including children with disabilities, those injured, or those separated from their families, and concluded with terrifying results regarding the mental health of children in the Strip.
According to experts, psychological support in Gaza operates under immense pressure, explaining that when families themselves are afflicted, and health centers are targeted or exhausted, access to psychological care becomes limited. Even when support initiatives are available, the continuation of bombing or displacement dissipates their impact. Trauma cannot be treated while the source of the trauma still exists.
The body also pays the price
The war on the children of Gaza is not only a psychological matter. There are children who are martyred directly, children who are left with permanent disabilities, and children whose illnesses worsen because treatment was disrupted, medicines ran out, or it became impossible to reach the hospital. Here, another face of the aggression appears: not only what the shell does when it falls, but what the siege does when it strangles the simplest conditions for survival.
According to official reports, 15 children have been recorded as being injured daily with permanent disabilities due to the occupation’s use of internationally prohibited explosive weapons, and the number of cases of children with amputations reached 864 children, while cases of brain and spinal cord injuries reached 1,268 children, according to the Government Media Office (GMO).
Malnutrition is a clear example of this. A child who does not receive sufficient and balanced food is not only exposed to momentary hunger, but to a delay in growth, weakness in immunity, and problems with concentration and learning. In an environment where waves of displacement are repeated, securing milk, medicine, and clean water becomes a grueling daily matter, especially for infants and young children.
Furthermore, disability in war conditions does not end with the injury itself. A child who loses a limb or suffers burns or a spinal injury needs long rehabilitation, assistive devices, medical follow-up, and a suitable environment. In Gaza, these needs often turn into an additional battle due to destruction, lack of resources, and the continued closure.
The school is not just a building
When schools are bombed, closed, or turned into shelter centers, the loss is not limited to the cessation of lessons. For a child, the school is a space of regularity, a meeting place, and a framework that mitigates chaos. Therefore, the destruction of the educational process strikes one of the most important barriers that prevent the complete collapse of daily life.
The repeated interruption of education in Gaza creates a deep gap. Some children lose months or years of achievement, the level of some declines sharply due to fear, hunger, and displacement, and some are pushed early into work or assuming roles beyond their age. In this case, talking about educational compensation is not simple, because the problem is not in the curriculum alone, but in the environment that makes focus itself a rare luxury.
Above that, the child in the atmosphere of war learns harsh lessons ahead of time. They learn the names of weapons before the names of school semesters, and distinguish between the sounds of aircraft instead of focusing on letters and numbers. This in itself is a violent distortion of the natural path of childhood.
The war caused the interruption of formal schooling since 2023, and despite the Ministry of Education’s adoption of alternative educational paths, such as synchronous and asynchronous e-learning, and temporary schools, many of these students have not been able to receive their education effectively throughout this period, due to the lack of safe areas, in addition to electricity and internet outages, and the lack of available necessary devices, which warns of an educational gap that threatens the future of an entire generation.
The family under pressure – and the child in the heart of the storm
The family in Gaza is not immune to collapse. When a father loses his job, or a mother is killed, or a sister is injured, or a family is forced to displace repeatedly, the child lives within a strained and wounded social structure. Even the parents who try to contain the situation may themselves be drowned in trauma, loss, and helplessness.
This does not mean the weakness of Palestinian families, but rather reveals the scale of the burden imposed on them. Many fathers and mothers in Gaza continue to protect their children with very limited tools, and they create spaces of patience and steadfastness from the minimum. But the hard truth remains that the war targets the family fabric itself. A child who loses one or both parents does not face a passing sadness, but a radical change in their emotional, social, and economic life.
In some cases, children are forced to perform adult roles. The older brother may care for his siblings, or the young girl searches with her mother for water and food, or the child lives with a constant sense that they must be strong all the time. This forced maturity is not necessarily counted as strength, but may be another face of the deprivation of childhood.
The occupation deprived children in the Gaza Strip of their right to maintain their families and stay with them, as estimates indicate the presence of about 18,000 children who are unaccompanied or separated from their parents in the Gaza Strip, while the number of orphans of the latest Israeli aggression reached 55,157 orphans, each of whom embodies a touching story of loss and grief.
The impact of war on Gaza’s children in memory and identity
It is not true that children forget quickly as is sometimes said. Some of them remember small details with terrifying accuracy: the color of the dust after the explosion, the smell of the fire, the last sentence a martyr from the family said, the location of the toy that remained under the rubble. This memory does not pass simply, but enters into their psychological, emotional, and political formation.
The Palestinian child in Gaza is not shaped only under the weight of fear, but also under an early awareness of injustice. They see that their home was bombed, that their school was disrupted, and that their survival is not guaranteed even while they are asleep. From here, big questions are formed about justice, right, and the world. This awareness is not a side detail, but part of the identity of a generation that grew up seeing aggression as a continuous structure, not a separate incident.
But this does not mean that all children respond in the same way. There are those who collapse, there are those who resist, and there are those who fluctuate between the two states. The basic idea is that the war leaves a long-term impact, the shape of which changes from one child to another, and from one age stage to another.
What does this mean in the long run?
When war targets children, it does not only strike the present, but it strikes the entire social future. A generation suffering from trauma, educational disruption, malnutrition, and family loss will need many years to regain some of its balance. Even this recovery is not guaranteed if the same causes continue.
Societies are not measured only by the number of buildings that are rebuilt, but by their ability to protect their generations. In Gaza, talking about reconstruction becomes incomplete if it ignores the restoration of the human being, especially the child. The issue is not just restoring a destroyed school, but restoring the child’s relationship with the place, with the future, and with the idea that life has regularity and meaning.
There is also a political impact that cannot be ignored. The child who grows up in a world that constantly fails them will carry this realization with them. International silence, moral selectivity, and the delay in protection and accountability, all do not pass outside people’s awareness. Even if the child does not phrase it in legal terms, they feel its direct result on their body, home, and family.
What do the children of Gaza really need?
Serious talk about the children of Gaza must not be reduced to expressions of sympathy. They need, first, a stop to the machine of Israeli aggression that creates tragedy daily. After that, they need sustainable protection, real health care, continuous psychological support, sustainable education, and an environment that allows them to be children, not just temporary survivors.
They also need a media and humanitarian discourse that sees them as full human beings, not numbers in seasonal reports. This is a fundamental point, because turning children into numbers mitigates the impact of the crime in the public consciousness. As for bringing their names, stories, and rights back to the forefront, it is part of the battle for truth itself that Palestinian platforms, including PIC, have carried over many years of coverage and testimony.
What is happening in Gaza is not a natural fate, and it is not a humanitarian crisis isolated from the political and military actor that creates it. When the child is the weakest and clearest target, any honest conversation begins by calling things by their names: there is a childhood being violated, a memory being wounded, and a future being punished because it is Palestinian.
Hope remains pinned on the ability of the Palestinians themselves to cling to life despite the destruction, and on the transformation of the testimony on the suffering of children into an act of protection and accountability, not just into a new archive of pain.
