Gaza Ministry tallies 54,468 children left without parents

Children in Gaza are moving every two days between relatives' tents because they have nowhere permanent to stay. The Palestinian Ministry of Social Development in Gaza has registered 54,468 minors who have lost one or both parents since October 2023. Its registry also lists around 3,000 children who have no registered guardian, custodian or caregiver.

The territorywide count of orphans stands at 71,000, a figure that includes people bereaved during earlier Israeli military campaigns in Gaza. There are at least 64,000 widows across the territory. Warda al-Muzeini, an aunt of three children who cycle between her home and those of her sisters, lost her husband in an Israeli air strike and now raises four children of her own without a job or steady income. She said she can struggle to put together even one meal a day. Her sisters divide the costs of the orphans' clothing and pocket money among themselves.

Ministry spokesperson Aziza al-Kahlout said the totals cannot show the daily toll. A child who has lost both parents loses care and safety as well as schooling, she said, and is pushed into duties beyond their years. Women who become a family's sole breadwinners must provide for children while raising them amid destruction. Kahlout pointed to what she called deeply alarming signs of growing risks of child labour, school dropout and early marriage in Gaza, tied to poverty, displacement and the loss of family breadwinners. She said orphaned children are especially exposed as economic and humanitarian conditions worsen and shelter remains scarce.

Mariam, 16, Aya, 14, and Jebril, 12, lost their father during Israel's 2014 offensive on Gaza. Their home in Gaza City was destroyed after the war began in 2023, and they sheltered with their mother, Islam, in a makeshift tent in Deir al-Balah. Nineteen days after the ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, an Israeli bomb hit the tent and killed her in front of them. Jebril was in his mother's lap when the blast struck and was injured himself. Their aunt al-Muzeini said the children have no stable home, staying mostly with their paternal grandmother while rotating between maternal aunts, two nights apiece.

Some children lost everyone. Wafaa al-Attar, now 13, was 10 when she left home on 22 February 2024 to charge her father's phone at an uncle's house nearby. A blast struck the multi-storey building in Deir al-Balah where her family was, killing her father, Ahmed, her mother, Khouloud, and her four siblings: Rital, eight, Muhammed, five, Obada, three, and nine-month-old Yazan. She suffered minor shrapnel injuries. "I turned around, and our home was no longer there," she said. She stayed first with her grandparents and later with her uncle, his wife and their newborn. "For months, I wished I had been with them in the house when it was bombed. I wished I had been killed with them," Attar said.