Prepared by: Arab Network Early Childhood (ANECD)’s Media and Communication Department

Date: 11/11/2024

For over a year, we at the Arab Network for Early Childhood followed and documented Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip against its inhabitants, including children and families. We wrote about Israel’s violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in all its clauses, international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions. We documented thousands of ways in which Gaza’s children and their families died. We talked about the deliberate starvation of children and families and the withholding of aid. We highlighted the extent of the systematic destruction of the educational sector, the medical sector, and the medical staff, whose rehabilitation will take years. We monitored the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of families and children in places that cannot accommodate dozens of them. We monitored what we could of the suffering of the residents of the south, who were crammed by Israel into “protected” areas that are shrinking day by day and whose residents are being directly targeted. We documented diseases, most notably polio, which reappeared in Gaza after 25 years of disappearance. 

After making good progress in the southern Gaza Strip in the vaccination campaigns, on 1 November 2024, the third round of the vaccination campaign was launched in Gaza City, with the exception of the northern Gaza Strip, because Israel decided to prevent children from completing the vaccination as part of the “generals’ plan” or “heroes’ plan” as the Israeli media called it. Without officially announcing the adoption of the plan, Israel is carrying out a specific war crime aimed at forcible displacement, imposing a complete blockade and preventing the entry of aid in order to starve and then turning the north into a closed military zone to impose control and dismember it from the south. To achieve this, Israel is fragmenting, killing, abusing, and starving the residents of the northern Gaza Strip, their families and children, and preventing aid from reaching them. In October last year, Israel threatened the residents of the north to move towards the south or risk being “identified as a partner in a terrorist organisation”. It is worth mentioning that the occupation threw a bomb at a medical clinic where a vaccination campaign was taking place north of Gaza City, injuring three children. 

Because a picture is worth a thousand words, as Fred Bernard, an American businessman who used to work in the advertising industry, said, we decided to summarise a whole year of genocide in the form of “Ten Shots That Shook the World”, borrowing from the important historical book “Ten Days That Shook the World” by John Reed. The difference between Bernard and Gaza is that this footage is not for the purpose of advertising, and between Reed and Gaza is that the events have entered their second year and are not confined to ten days and that the footage is not a chronicle of events that have been happening for over a century, but a genocide against the children and families of Gaza that is taking place, happening and documented on live screens. We must always remember that what we see is terrible, but what is hidden is even greater.

Inas Abu Maamar, 37, cradles the body of her niece Sally, 5. Sally was martyred along with her mother, baby sister, grandparents, and other relatives. Inas also lost her sister, who was martyred with her four children in Gaza. The photo, taken by Mohammed Salem for Reuters, was named World Press Photo of the Year and won the Pulitzer Prize. The photo summarises the stories of more than 17,000 child martyrs, out of at least 43,000, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, and more than 50,000, according to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. An estimated 10 per cent of Gaza’s population has been killed, injured, missing or detained, with children accounting for the lion’s share. International organisations, including the Euro-Med Monitor, have documented direct executions of civilians, including children, sniping and dropping explosive bombs from remotely piloted Quadcopter drones, as well as bombing gatherings in markets, streets, near homes, water stations and internet distribution points.

This is Yazan al-Kafarneh, who died on 4 March 2024 as a result of the blockade and Israel’s prevention of food aid entering the Gaza Strip. He is one of dozens of children martyred as a result of the occupation’s policy of starvation as a tool to carry out genocide, especially in the northern Gaza Strip, and one of more than 50,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition, or 9 out of every 10 children, according to UNICEF. According to the UN, unless the fighting stops and more humanitarian aid arrives, the threat of famine will persist throughout Gaza during the winter. According to a food security assessment published in October 2024, 91% of Gaza’s population will face severe food insecurity. The Integrated Progressive Classification of Food Security (IPC) predicts about 60,000 acute malnutrition cases among children aged 6 months to 59 months (about 5 years), including 12,000 severe cases between September 2024 and August 2025.

Just like Yazan, more than one million children are victims of Israel’s deliberate approach to perpetuate famine by preventing the entry of aid and bombing it, as well as bombing Palestinians, including hundreds of children, during water collection and receiving humanitarian aid (the so-called flour massacres). In September 2024, for example, the World Food Programme (WFP) was unable to provide support to half of the families it planned to reach, and with reduced food rations, due to a lack of food supplies. In October, the programme was unable to distribute any food parcels. In October 2024, UN Secretary-General António Guterres reiterated his warning that famine was looming. The Israeli Knesset’s decision to ban the work of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main agency responsible for the distribution of humanitarian aid, for 90 days adds to the suffering of the people of Gaza. Members of the Security Council have described it as “the backbone of all humanitarian responses in Gaza.”

At the age of three, Ahmad Shabt lost both his legs and his parents after their home in Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip, was hit by an Israeli bombardment; he and his younger brother survived. Many of the injuries among the residents of Gaza were amputations, permanent disabilities and burns, especially as the occupation army used internationally banned weapons and types of ammunition, banned lethal bombs, and internationally banned white phosphorus, which can reach the bones. 

By the UN’s own description, Gaza has become home to the largest group of child amputees in modern history. Ahmad is one of 10 children who lose one or both legs every day, according to UNRWA data. He is one of more than 4,000 amputees, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. There are many cases in which limbs were amputated only because of the lack of proper medical equipment due to Israel’s denial of the right to treatment, health care and medical equipment, targeting hospitals and demanding their evacuation. 

In this context, the issue of people with disabilities, especially children, stands out. For years, Israel has adopted a policy of targeting that leads to disabilities, some of which are lifelong. Since the beginning of the genocide, thousands of children have been disabled as a result of Israeli shelling and direct targeting. UNICEF explained that the mental health of children with disabilities has been particularly affected by the challenges they face.

(Photo: Getty Images, Anadolu Agency) 

What you see in the picture is only a small sample of the damage caused by the Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip, which was estimated to be the size of two nuclear bombs and more bombs than the World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined. According to an assessment by the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), two-thirds of buildings in the Gaza Strip were damaged. On 15 July 2024, the UN released an assessment that indicated that it would take 15 years to remove 40 tonnes of rubble and debris, even with a fleet of more than 100 trucks (Photo: UNRWA).

Since 7 October last year, the Israeli occupation has adopted a policy of forced displacement of Gaza residents. To achieve this, it has used several methods, including storming homes and forcing Palestinians to evacuate with nowhere to go. It also resorted to starvation, intimidation, detention, and psychological persecution. Over the past year, 63 forced displacement orders have been issued. In its false claims, it first claimed that the south was safe, then identified specific areas in which it had accumulated more than one and a half million Palestinians, only to bomb them after families and children gathered there under false pretexts that flagrantly violated international laws and norms. Day after day, the safe areas were shrinking until the United Nations announced that most of Gaza’s population now lives in an area that does not exceed 11% of its area. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee nine to ten times. With the onset of winter, cries for necessities become louder, from tents that have been torn apart and will not withstand the strong winds to heating and fuel. With the occupation’s destruction of most of Gaza’s infrastructure, sewage water runs through the tents of the displaced, leading to the spread of diseases and epidemics, especially among children.
(Photo: 10 November 2023, UNICEF)

This is the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, where the occupation arrests dozens of Palestinians and forces them to undress. Among the humiliated detainees are children and the elderly. This is not the first time the occupation has forced residents of the Gaza Strip to do this. In Jabalia, as in the rest of the north, the occupation is working to terrorise more than 400,000 Palestinians who are still confined to their homes. To achieve this, Israel is committing a crime aimed at displacing them and turning the north into a closed military zone to control it, committing mass massacres, imposing a siege on the north, starving families and children, and preventing aid from reaching them amidst a near-total blackout. International humanitarian law prohibits forced displacement. Even if the population is asked to leave, civilians who choose to remain in their homes are not immune, and it is the responsibility of the warring parties (i.e. Israel, since it occupies the Gaza Strip) to protect these civilians, especially children, who enjoy special protection under international law and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

The issue of orphaned children in Gaza, or so-called unaccompanied children, is not new in the Strip, but with the intensification of the genocide, their numbers have risen dramatically. In August 2024, UNICEF estimated that there were at least 19,000 children. On the first anniversary of the genocide, the Ministry of Health in Gaza estimated their number at a minimum of 26,000. The “Taawon” (Welfare Association) runs a campaign to sponsor and care for orphans in Gaza. The number of missing children exceeds 10,000 at a minimum, with estimates that the number is much higher, given the number of those under the rubble, those whose bodies have decomposed, those still lying in the streets or buried by the roadside with the expression “unknown martyr”, and reports of Israeli abductions of Palestinian children and excavation of some mass graves.
(Photo: UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)) 

After ten years of waiting, Rania Abu Anza gave birth to twins, but the occupation stole them from her along with her husband and 11 family members in an Israeli bombing of their home in Rafah on 3 March 2024. Rania tried to conceive amidst the Israeli siege, gave birth in the shadow of genocide, and her two children were killed in a direct bombing.
(Photo: Reuters)

Shaaban Al Dalou. He is not a child by international definition, nor does he fall into the early childhood category. But 20-year-old Shaaban was once a child. He is the literal embodiment of successive generations being drained by the occupation and having their dreams burned. Shaaban was burned, literally, not metaphorically. He was burned alive. He raised his hand in distress after the Israeli occupation targeted the tents of displaced people inside the walls of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Shaaban was studying at the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, but just as Israel kills the dreams of children, it kills the dreams of adults. It is the Palestinian holocaust.