Some show up alone and injured at the hospital.
Others are helped by strangers who notice that a child is wandering next to them following the crowd.
Four and a half months of war in Gaza have left some 17,000 minors separated from their families, according to data from Unicef, the United Nations Children's agency.
Some of them are orphans, whether they know it or not;
others got lost.
It is only an estimate because, in the chaos prevailing in the Strip, it is impossible to determine their exact number.
They represent 1% of the 1.7 million displaced people, concentrated mainly in the Rafah region, that the Israeli army will not conclude the war without invading, as its leaders insist daily.
“Like all the data that has to do with Gaza today, it is proportionally much higher than that of any other conflict in the modern era,” Hamish Young, UNICEF senior emergency coordinator, points out by videoconference from the southern city of the Strip.
“Many do not know if their parents are alive or not,” explains by phone Ruth Conde, a Spanish pediatric nurse who returned from southern Gaza last January after a month volunteering in different medical centers with the NGO Doctors Without Borders.
In some bombings of homes in densely populated areas, up to twenty members of the same family clan have died.
In Palestine - and in the Arab world in general - the family network is extensive, and it is common to add floors to the same property so that the male children become independent after getting married.
A portion of these unaccompanied children arrive at the hospital injured and on their own, says Conde.
“They themselves are the ones who tell you that they are alone.”
There is an acronym in English to define them, WCNSF
: wounded child, no surviving family
.
Others are brought by strangers who are already having a hard time to feed their own children.
“They arrive from people who say: 'We found him when we were going from Khan Yunis to Rafah and we integrated him,' recalls Conde.
“They have such levels of anxiety that we have seen self-harming behavior and even suicidal ideation.”
Even before the war, Unicef estimated that half a million needed mental health support.
Now, it puts traumatized children at one million, after 136 days of war with almost 30,000 Palestinians dead in the midst of unprecedented destruction since World War II and a humanitarian crisis.
“When you flee for your life,” explains Young, “it is very easy for parents to lose a child, especially if they are young or are caring for several children at the same time.
Sometimes they have to, at the same time, carry a baby in their arms and drag several children by the hand.
It is very, very easy for them to become separated under those circumstances.”
If this ease of separation is added, the scale of the forced displacements that Gaza has registered and the data from similar situations in other parts of the planet, the emergency coordinator considers “most likely” that it is “the main reason” why So many minors are not accompanied by their families today.
Between October and November, around a million people fled from the north to the south by order of the army.
At the beginning of December, after a week of ceasefire, Israel began to focus its bombing in the south and ended up invading Khan Yunis, the main city in the area, which has generated other smaller-scale exoduses.
Sometimes it's the same people, looking for a safe place that doesn't exist.
Vulnerable
The most vulnerable cases are those for whom no one can find a family connection, explains Young, giving as an example a four-year-old girl whom he has visited on several occasions.
She “she wandered unaccompanied in the middle of a combat zone […].
We took her to the hospital.
She had some injuries and was tremendously traumatized.
For a while she couldn't even speak.
She is now well cared for and protected, both physically and in psychosocial support, but she only says her first name, without her last name.
“She cannot tell what has happened to her, where she comes from, or who her parents are,” she says.
When reporting on the estimate of minors separated from the family, at a press conference in Geneva at the beginning of the month, the head of rights defense and communications for Unicef in Palestine, Jonathan Crickx, mentioned two other cases, which he had just learned about. first-hand: “I saw two very young children, six and four years old, in a center where unaccompanied minors are housed and cared for.
They are cousins and their entire respective families were killed in the first half of December.
The four-year-old girl in particular is still very much in
shock
.
I met those children in Rafah.
We fear that the situation for those who have lost their parents will be much worse in northern and central Gaza.”
To the north, where more cases of severe malnutrition are recorded, humanitarian aid does not reach.
In the south, the work of international organizations and NGOs is concentrated, so there is a registration process and a protocol to address them.
On the one hand, there are organized shelters, such as those of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), where they are cared for by community and, sometimes, social or health workers.
In the least organized, everything works more organically and without records, says Young.
People ask to try to connect them with members of their family clan.
In Gaza, social ties are close and neighbors usually know the patronymic of each person or notables in the area.
But everything is more complicated in the crowded chaos of Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of people are in official shelters;
many others in tents, and an undetermined number, hosted by relatives, out of solidarity or paying rent in apartments or rooms.
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