The War in Gaza Is Making Thousands of Orphans

The boys are aching to see their parents again. They are convinced it will happen as soon as they can go back to Gaza City, where they were growing up before the war bulldozed that life.

“Baba and mama will be waiting for us there,” they say to their aunt Samar, who is taking care of the four of them, Mohammed, Mahmoud, Ahmed and Abdullah Akeila. They say this even though they were told their parents are dead, have been dead for months, ever since the airstrike that hit next to where the family was sheltering.

Except for Ahmed, the second youngest at 13, none of them saw the bodies. The brothers spend every passing milestone in tears, almost unable to speak — Mother’s Day was hard; so was the Eid holiday — yet still they hold out hope. Every evening when the sundown prayer is said, 9-year-old Abdullah says he can hear his mother’s voice.

Their aunt, Samar al-Jaja, 31, who shares a tent with the children in the Gazan city of Khan Younis, is at a loss. “When they see other parents holding their kids close and talking to them,” she said, “how do they feel?”

The war in Gaza is taking children from parents and parents from children, undoing the natural order of things, rupturing the basic unit of Gazan life. It is making so many orphans in such chaos that no agency or aid group can count them.