Opinion | These Are Your Options as a Palestinian Orphan in Gaza

A Palestinian woman carries a baby as families leave the eastern sector of the Gaza Strip on the border with Israel following Israeli airstrikes that targeted northern and other parts of Gaza in March.Credit: AFP/Bashar Taleb

"This poor baby has lost his right to grow up with his family," says the aunt of ten-month-old Osama Al-Krinawi. Osama is one of thousands of Palestinian children who have been orphaned in the war.

He was born in December 2023 to Mohammed and Alham, after 16 years of marriage. Ten days later, his father was killed, along with his grandfather and uncle, in an Israeli strike on their home in Gaza. He and his mother were pulled out from the rubble. His mother fled to Deir Al-Balah in search of refuge, but was killed, with dozens of others, when the house she was staying in was bombed.

Fortunately for the infant Osama, who had lost his parents, grandfather and uncle, other members of his extended family who were still alive took him in, thereby saving him from death, starvation, exploitation and child trafficking. But that is definitely not the fate of every Gazan child who has been orphaned or separated from their parents.

Although it is very difficult to verify information in the current wartime conditions in Gaza, according to Save the Children, the number of lost children – those separated from their parents or who have disappeared (not including the dead beneath the rubble) is about 17,000.

A woman and child mourn next to the bodies of loved ones killed during an Israeli strike that targeted a UN clinic in the Jablya camp for Palestinian refugees, at the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, in April.Credit: AFP/Omar Al-Qattaa

Gaza is not only a cemetery for Palestinian children, as many claim, it is also hell for living children. Imagine 17,000 Palestinian children wandering among the ruins and bodies, exposed to all kinds of violence and exploitation. So if you're not a Palestinian child beneath the rubble for a year and considered missing, or wandering around the ruins, or who by a miracle reached one of Gaza's orphanages that has not been bombed, you face three choices, each one worse than the next.

In the first scenario, you join your extended family, who take you in and protect you, but who are still strangers, whose commitment to keep and protect you strongly depends on their resources. After all, they took you in because they have no choice, and they are struggling to feed their own children. You're therefore an unwanted burden.

In the second scenario, you flee and find shelter in one of the only four orphanages, which have not yet been bombed, which have become shelters to thousands of Palestinian refugees, where you join 33,000 orphaned Palestinian children who lived there before the war. In both situations, you are a Palestinian child in a circle of people who you don't know in an environment with social codes and balances of powers that have changed unrecognizably.

The unconditional love, care, and protection that you received from your nuclear family before the current war, turns into a "favor" that other family members and strangers provide, not exactly out of a deep human and moral obligation. Moreover, your safety, life, survival and the survival of your siblings depend on strangers who themselves are facing a constant struggle to survive, while you, as a child who has no first-degree blood relations, are not their priority. After all, everyone has more mouths to feed.

These dynamics, combined with loneliness, alienation and the need to survive, force Palestinian children to beg for food, shelter and protection from strangers. In the shadow of the total destruction of the social fabric, this is a time of vulnerability, humiliation and exploitation.

In the third scenario, if you are no longer an infant, you're liable to find yourself among hundreds of Palestinians arrested by the Israeli army. Yes, for those unaware, the Israeli army raids homes and shelters, arrests dozens and even hundreds of men suspected of having Hamas ties, and forces their families to go to other parts of Gaza. The result is divided families and, frequently, lost children.

The disappearance of four-year-old Massa Ajour, who was shot by Israeli soldiers and separated from her mother, demonstrates this. Massa's mother, Rim Ajour, last saw her daughter and husband in March 2024, during a raid in northern Gaza. Ten months have since passed, and she doesn't know their fate. The army denies any connection to the incident and to their arrest. HaMoked Center for Defence of the Individual states that this is only one of thousands of cases of Palestinians who have disappeared under the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law.

"I am alive and dead at the same time," said Rim Ajour in an interview. It is important to note, on the basis of information provided by HaMoked, which represents some of the missing families, that the Ajour family's case is one of thousands of cases of Palestinian adults and children who have disappeared during the war.

Protesters outside the Supreme Court in Jerusalem hold sights against the "dictatorship" of Supreme Court President Isaac Amit.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi

HaMoked executive director Jessica Montell said that there has never been an instance of such mass disappearances in which the families are provided no information for weeks. She said that HaMoked has asked for information on 900 missing people, whom to the best of its knowledge, are under Israeli jurisdiction. The army has confirmed that it holds only 500 detainees. What has happened to the other 400? No one knows.

Petitions to the High Court of Justice don't help either. A petition that HaMoked filed on the issue was dismissed without even examining the means to prevent recurrence of such cases in the future. The families do not know whether their dear ones are detained or dead.

I therefore ask forgiveness and pardon from the children of Gaza, because it turns out that there is a fourth scenario. In this scenario, some of the High Court judges refuse to intervene and force the Israeli army to provide answers to thousands of Palestinian families who have been living in uncertainty for over a year.

In the fourth scenario, there is an entire Israeli system, legal and well-oiled, that permits the committing of war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and may even be a party to them by its very refusal to provide answers.

And worse. In this scenario, the High Court and some of its justices, who know that family and community can save the lives of Palestinian children in wartime, are parties to the policy of systematic destruction of the Palestinian social fabric. In this scenario, if you're a Palestinian child, you're subhuman, and your life is not even worth a High Court hearing. Your family has no right to receive answers and have closure, and you have no chance to survive.