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The Washington Post said that Youssef Sharaf (38 years old) was distributing food to displaced people from Gaza on October 25 when he received a phone call about an Israeli raid on the tower where his family lives.
Since that time until today, he has been trying to recover the bodies of his four children buried under his destroyed house in Gaza City, where his parents and wife were killed, as were his three brothers, two sisters, uncles, their spouses, and many of their children in the same attack.
Sharaf – who lost his three daughters under the rubble, Malak (11 years old), Yasmine (6 years old), and Nour (3 years old), and his only son Malik (10 years old) – told the newspaper by phone that about 30 of his relatives were staying with them in the hope of finding safety. “All the families were civilians and were looking for a simple life. We thought we were living in a safe place.”
The grieving man added after asking, “Can you imagine my pain?” His brother, who had just given birth to a child after 16 years of waiting, was killed along with his wife and child, as were 13 of his nephews and nieces, including Lana (16 years old), Hala (11 years old), Jana (9 years old), Juri (6 years old), and Tulin ( 4 years old), Karim (2 years old), and Obaida, who was not more than one year old.
Losing an entire generation
The newspaper indicated – in a joint report between Louay Ayoub, Myriam Berger, and Hajar Harb – that families not only feel sadness over their losses, but also what appears to be the loss of an entire generation, as more than 3,700 children have been killed in Gaza since the war began on October 7. The first, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
According to Jason Lee, director of Save the Children in the Palestinian Territories, children constitute 2 out of every 5 civilian martyrs in Gaza, and this does not include about a thousand children who are still trapped under the rubble, according to the organization’s estimates. Jason Lee says, “We are now in a situation where people are being killed.” A child every 10 minutes.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child said on Wednesday in a statement calling for a ceasefire that “there is no winner in a war in which thousands of children have been killed.” James Elder, a spokesman for UNICEF, said in a press conference, “Gaza has become a cemetery for children. Everyone there lives In hell.”
Ahmed Al-Farra, head of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, confirmed that what doctors can do to save the lives of children when they transport wounded people to hospitals becomes less and less every day. He added that many children arrive from the sites of attacks with horrific injuries, Cut parts of the body, shrapnel wounds, severe burns, and internal bleeding from the force of the explosions.
They are not numbers
In 3 hospitals in different parts of Gaza, doctors told the newspaper that they had never seen children suffering from such horrific injuries before. Hossam Abu Safiya, a doctor at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said, “I have been working here for more than 25 years and I have seen all the wars. But this war is different,” he explained, “We are talking about hundreds of children who need medical care or else they will die in the street.”
In another case, Shahd (18 years old), who dreamed of having daughters, returned to her home after giving birth to twin daughters, Misk and Masa, but the war began a few weeks later, so Shahd fled with her large family from Gaza City to Nuseirat in the south, and there she was killed. After more than two months in an Israeli raid, Shahad says, “There is no safety in this place. All my dreams have become meaningless mirages.”
The family moved to another place in Nuseirat, and 10 days later, during a communications blackout for more than 30 hours in Gaza, 3 other children in the family were killed in an Israeli raid: Lana (9 years old), Hassan (8 years old), and Rana (6 years old).
Saadia, the family’s aunt, said about her niece, Nouran, who was disfigured by the explosion: “We aspired for Nouran to become a doctor. Today, we no longer know how Nouran would face herself in the mirror.” With tears in her eyes, she asked, “Are these the goals of the war?” “Our children are not numbers,” she added. “They have a story worth telling.”
