The trauma of childhood in Gaza

Over the past two years, tens of thousands of children in the territory have been killed, wounded or orphaned. Childhood as they once knew it has ceased to exist

To numb the traumas of wartime in the Gaza Strip, Rahma Abu Abed, 12, plays a game with her friends. They ask one another: What did you eat before the war? What did your home look like before the war? What would you wear if you had new clothes?

For Rahma, who recounted these details in an interview alongside her mother, Heba, the answers are often less soothing than tragic. She hasn’t eaten meat in months, her parents said. Her home in southern Gaza has been flattened, satellite imagery shows. Her clothes are mostly under the rubble. The beach, where her parents occasionally took her as a treat before the war, has become her full-time home.

Rahma now lives in a storehouse for fishing equipment with her parents and four siblings, who share the space with several displaced families. She usually eats one meal a day, often lentils or pasta, her parents said. Trying to remember what good food looked like, Rahma plays with the wet sand, shaping it into imaginary meals.

“If someone gave me a choice between crayons and bread,” Rahma said, “I would choose the bread.”

After 22 months of war, childhood in Gaza hardly exists.

There are about 1.1 million children in the territory, and nearly all require mental health or psychosocial support, according to research by the United Nations. Most of them have been out of school for nearly two years. After Israel’s 11-week blockade on food this year, all children younger than 5 are at risk of acute malnutrition, the U.N. said.

Israel’s military operation, which began after the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has killed more than 18,000 Palestinians younger than 18, according to Gaza’s health authorities, who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. About two-thirds of them did not reach their teenage years. A New York Times investigation last year found that since the start of the war, the Israeli military has significantly loosened safeguards meant to protect civilians, including children.

“Normal markers of childhood are gone, replaced by hunger, fear and all-consuming trauma,” said James Elder, a spokesperson for UNICEF who has regularly visited Gaza throughout the war. “This war is being waged as if childhood itself has no place in Gaza.”

The Israeli military has said that it tries to minimize harm to all civilians, including children, and blamed Hamas militants for hiding among them, sometimes alongside their own families. Soldiers with the Israel Defense Forces have reported seeing children used as lookouts by Palestinian militant groups, which also kidnapped and killed children on October 7, 2023.

“Intentional harm to civilians, and especially to children, is strictly prohibited and completely contrary to both international law and the binding orders of the IDF,” the military said in a statement.

A life of hunger

As Rahma flicked recently through prewar photos on a cellphone, she stopped at an image of herself at an ice cream parlor.

“I just stared at it,” she said. “I felt like I didn’t recognize those days.”

Life for Rahma, like that of many children in Gaza, has become one of hunger. Israel has limited food supplies to the enclave since the earliest days of the war, and the situation has worsened since March, when Israel began its blockade. In late May, Israel allowed some food back into the territory, using private contractors to distribute the food from a few sites.

But for families like Rahma’s, that did not solve the problem. Reaching the sites is dangerous and exhausting in part because they were built behind Israeli military lines, far from where most people live. Hundreds have been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers as they try to reach the sites, and those who get there unscathed often find the food has already been taken. Israel says its soldiers have fired “warning shots” at people who have strayed from designated access routes toward Israeli military lines.

Reaching the sites is a process that favors the fittest. Rahma’s father, Nidal Abu Abed, 42, has often been knocked over during the rush toward the sites, and he was once nearly shot, according to Rahma’s mother, Heba Abu Abed, 32. Because he rarely manages to secure a box of food, Heba Abu Abed added, her husband is regularly forced to gather lentil grains or bits of broken pasta that have spilled onto the ground.

“He picks them up, I clean them, and I rinse them again and again to remove the sand or dust,” Abu Abed said. “Then I cook them for the children. That’s our meal, once a day, if we’re lucky.”

Rahma’s younger sister, Rital, 2, is just learning to talk. The process of seeking aid looms so large in Rital’s life that it even dominates her limited vocabulary.

“Where’s your dad?” Rital was asked on a recent afternoon.

“Baba aid!” she replied.

While some food is available in the markets, it has often been unaffordable for families like Rahma’s; her parents, like the vast majority of Gaza residents, have no work. Although food prices have dropped in recent days after a rise in deliveries, they are still astronomically high. On Aug. 13, according to the Gaza Chamber of Commerce and Industry, flour cost more than 10 times its prewar price.

Rahma helps her family survive by fetching water. She stands in line every day with several empty plastic containers, waiting for a water truck sent by an aid group. The process lasts for hours in the hot sun, often until the afternoon. People often push past her, knowing she can do little to stop them.

To alleviate the food crisis, which drew global condemnation, Israel recently loosened restrictions on U.N. food convoys and permitted foreign air forces to airdrop aid packages over Gaza.

When Rahma gazes up at those planes, she said, she wishes one would fly her family to a safer place.

“I imagine riding on it like a hot-air balloon, going to a country with no war — just food, school and toys,” she said.

A world without school

Hala Abu Hilal, 10, pretends to be a teacher to keep her four younger sisters entertained. She stands up in their tent and recites things she remembers from school — sometimes simple math equations, sometimes the alphabet.

“Two plus four equals?” she calls.

“Six!” they reply.

In today’s Gaza, this game of make-believe is as close as most children get to school. Some 95% of schools have been damaged in the fighting, leaving most children without education for nearly two academic years, according to U.N. data. Many schools have been turned into displacement camps. Israel has regularly struck them, saying that Hamas leaders have used them as cover.

Hala’s school, like her home, is inaccessible. She is from Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, which has largely been flattened. She and her family fled their home last year and now live in a displacement camp close to a beach miles to the north.

In this camp, there is currently no school, according to Hala’s mother, Sanaa Abu Hilal. For a few months, volunteers in the camp ran a makeshift classroom, teaching ad hoc classes in a tent, but that system ended when the last truce collapsed in March, Abu Hilal said.

The U.N. tries to provide basic teaching via an online portal; some teachers also send educational material to parents via WhatsApp. But for families like Hala’s, the internet is often inaccessible. It’s hard to connect for prolonged periods to the phone network, and phone batteries run out quickly. Abu Hilal has a phone with a broken screen that barely responds to her touch.

Instead, Abu Hilal tries to teach the children herself. Recently, she did Arabic grammar with Hala; simple geometry with Bisan, 6; and the alphabet with Deema, 5. But the sisters have lost four semesters of learning, while Bisan, who should have started school this year, has never received formal education.

Their sister, Tala, 8, seems most affected by the lack of classes. With no school to attend, Tala whiles away the day inventing games, some of which are disturbingly warped by the violence that surrounds her. Once, her mother recalled, Tala picked up a stone and said to her sisters, “I’ll throw this stone. Pretend it’s an F-16 missile.”

Then she hurled it at a tent.

Before the war, Abu Hilal said, Tala was the star of her class and sometimes got up in the middle of the night to cram for tests. “I wanted to be a doctor,” Tala said in an interview alongside her mother. “I wanted my daddy to build a hospital for me. I wanted to treat everyone for free. My daddy is in heaven now.”

Their father, Ashraf Abu Hilal, a former janitor, tried to return to their home last August, seeking to retrieve some goods that he could sell for food, according to Sanaa Abu Hilal. He never returned.

A day later, his brother spotted him lying dead in a nearby street, she said. Nearby gunfire prevented the brother from reaching Ashraf’s body or discerning how he had died, she added. By the time they could reach the street safely, months later, little was left of the body, she said. (The Israeli military said it was unaware of the episode.)

“I hear how other kids call their dads — and their dad’s reply,” Abu Hilal recalled Hala telling her. “I wish baba could answer me, too.”

A childhood without parents

On one page in his notebook, Sajed al-Ghalban, 10, has drawn a picture of his mother and father at their old home in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. On another page, there’s a drawing of his mother taking him to a vegetable stand.

This is the closest Sajed can get to a hug from his parents. His father, Muhammad, and mother, Shireen, were killed in a strike that also destroyed their home in the third week of the war in 2023. The Israeli military said the house had been used for “terror purposes” and declined to comment on whether Muhammad al-Ghalban was the target. One of Sajed’s surviving aunts, Amany Abu Salah, said Sajed’s father had no links to militant groups. It was not possible to verify either assertion.

Sajed survived the attack unscathed, but his sister Alma, now 12, and brother Abdallah, now 8, suffered head injuries, according to video of the aftermath and their surviving relatives. Alma was later evacuated to Turkey for treatment, relatives told the Times.

For nearly two years, Sajed and Abdallah were cared for by another aunt. Then, in July, that aunt was killed in a strike on a nearby tent that also wounded the boys, according to Abu Salah, the surviving aunt. Now they live in another tent with Abu Salah and her three children.

The boys’ skin is still scarred by the shrapnel from the second strike. Abdallah has scars on his stomach and shoulder, Sajed on his foot and back. The Israeli military confirmed the attack, saying it was aimed at Hamas militants.

The brothers are among at least 40,000 children who have lost at least one parent since the start of the war, according to statistics published by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which employs thousands of officials in Gaza.

The children live in an encampment that local volunteers have created mainly to care for those orphaned in the war; in this camp alone, there are roughly 1,200 orphans, according to the camp administrators.

With no parents and a younger brother to care for, Sajed is suspended between childhood and premature adulthood. Sometimes he draws childish pictures in his notebook. Or he plays marbles and hide-and-seek with other children in the camp. But he is also increasingly trying to support his aunt in keeping their makeshift household together, according to Abu Salah.

He sweeps the tent each morning. He lines up for hours in the heat to fetch water. He fixes the tent poles when they collapse. He makes kites from scrap material and sells them for pocket change that he saves to buy food for himself and Abdallah.

“I’m the man now,” Sajed told his aunt, she said. “I’ll go buy what we need.”

Recently, Sajed, remembering how his father kept a rifle at home, said he wanted to help guard the aid convoys that bring food into Gaza. He also offered to make the perilous journey to the aid distribution sites, despite the risk of getting shot by soldiers or crushed by the crowds.

“How would you do that?” Abu Salah remembered asking him.

“I’ll do it just like the men do,” Sajed replied, she said.

Yet, sometimes Sajed just wants to be a child. He misses the sweets he ate before the war, he said. He misses being with his mother in their kitchen. He misses going to the park with his father.

“Why do all kids now have to wait in line for water?” Sajed asked.

“I just want to go home, to go to school,” he said. “I just want the war to stop.”