Israel says its airstrikes target Hamas militant sites and infrastructure, and it accuses the group of using civilians as human shields. It also says more than 500 militant rockets have misfired and landed in Gaza, killing an unknown number of Palestinians.
More children have been killed in just over three weeks in Gaza than in all of the world\u2019s conflicts combined in each of the past three years, according to the global charity Save the Children. For example, it said, 2,985 children were killed across two dozen war zones throughout all of last year.
\u201cGaza has become a graveyard for thousands of children,\u201d said James Elder, a spokesperson for UNICEF, the UN children\u2019s agency.
Images and footage of shell-shocked children being pulled from rubble in Gaza or writhing on dirty hospital gurneys have become commonplace and have fueled protests around the world. Scenes from recent airstrikes included a rescuer cradling a limp toddler in a bloodied white tutu, a bespectacled father shrieking as he clutched his dead child tight to his chest, and a dazed young boy covered in blood and dust staggering alone through the ruins.
\u201cIt\u2019s a curse to be a parent in Gaza,\u201d said Ahmed Modawikh, a 40-year-old carpenter from Gaza City whose life was shattered by the death of his 8-year-old daughter during five days of fighting in May.
Israeli children have also been killed. During Hamas\u2019 brutal Oct. 7 rampage across southern Israel that sparked the war, its gunmen killed more than 1,400 people. Among them were babies and other small children, Israeli officials have said, though they haven\u2019t provided exact figures. About 30 children were also among the roughly 240 hostages Hamas took.
As Israeli warplanes pound Gaza, Palestinian children huddle with large families in apartments or UN-run shelters. Although Israel has urged Palestinians to leave northern Gaza for the strip\u2019s south, nowhere in the territory has proven safe from its airstrikes.
\u201cPeople are running from death only to find death,\u201d said Yasmine Jouda, who lost 68 family members in Oct. 22 airstrikes that razed two four-story buildings in Deir Al-Balah, where they had sought refuge from northern Gaza.
The strike\u2019s only survivor was Jouda\u2019s year-old niece Milissa, whose mother had gone into labor during the attack and was found dead beneath the rubble, the heads of her lifeless twin newborns emerging from her birth canal.
\u201cWhat did this tiny baby do to deserve a life without any family?\u201d Jouda said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Israel blames Hamas for Gaza\u2019s death toll \u2014 now more than 8,800, according to Gaza\u2019s Health Ministry \u2014 because the militant group operates from jam-packed residential neighborhoods. Palestinians point to the soaring casualty count as proof that Israeli strikes are indiscriminate and disproportionate.
The war has injured more than 7,000 Palestinian children and left many with lifechanging problems, doctors say.
Just before the war, Jouda\u2019s niece Milissa walked a few paces for the first time. She will never walk again. Doctors say the airstrike that killed the girl\u2019s family fractured her spine and paralyzed her from the chest down. Just down the hall from her in the teeming central Gaza hospital, 4-year-old Kenzi woke up screaming, asking what had happened to her missing right arm.
\u201cIt will take so much care and work just to get her to the point of having half a normal life,\u201d her father said.
Even those physically unscathed may be scarred by war\u2019s ravages.
For 15-year-olds in Gaza, it\u2019s their fifth Israel-Hamas war since the militant group seized control of the enclave in 2007. All they\u2019ve known is life under a punishing Israeli-Egyptian blockade that prevents them from traveling abroad and crushes their hopes for the future. The strip has a 70 percent youth unemployment rate, according to the World Bank.
\u201cThere is no hope for these children to develop careers, improve their standard of living, access better health care and education,\u201d said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director for Defense for Children International in the Palestinian territories.
But in this war, he added, \u201cit\u2019s about life and death.\u201d
And in Gaza, death is everywhere.
Here are just a few of the 3,648 Palestinian children and minors who have been killed in the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DEIR AL-BALAH: More than 3,600 Palestinian children were killed in the first 25 days of the war between Israel and Hamas, according to Gaza\u2019s Hamas-run Health Ministry. They were hit by airstrikes, smashed by misfired rockets, burned by blasts and crushed by buildings, and among them were newborns and toddlers, avid readers, aspiring journalists and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2319,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-iran-iraq-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2318"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2321,"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2318\/revisions\/2321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ajmantimes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}