By Agnese Boffano

 

ISRAELI OCCUPIED GAZA, 02 August. - (ANA) - In Gaza, orphanhood is no longer a private family tragedy unfolding one household at a time. It has become a mass condition of war.

 

Speaking to The New Arab, Director General of Taawon Dr Tareq Emtairah said the number of children orphaned by the war has reached close to 60,000 — around six percent of Gaza's child population — a scale he described as unmatched by anything the Palestinian non-profit development organisation had seen in earlier assaults on the enclave.

 

The estimate is detailed in Taawon's new report, Lighting the Path for Orphaned Children in Gaza – A Call to Action, which warns that the unprecedented number of children who have lost one or both parents will require sustained, long-term support extending far beyond the immediate humanitarian response.

 

"Orphan care is not new to Taawon," Dr Tareq said. "We've been involved in this after every crisis that Gaza has gone through; Taawon has jumped in, but this war is entirely different. The scale of orphanhood is huge. We're talking about close to 60,000 children."

 

The percentage was alarming not only in itself, but because of the speed with which so many children had lost one or both parents "in a short period of time — probably the fastest growth ratio in the world."

 

The death toll in Gaza since Israel began its genocidal assault in October 2023 has topped 73,250. Almost all of Gaza's two million residents have been displaced multiple times and now live in makeshift camps and damaged buildings.

 

The numbers alone are staggering, but they only tell part of the story.

 

"A lot of the basic care infrastructure has been destroyed: schooling, healthcare, nurseries, all types of support infrastructure to us has been destroyed," Dr Tareq explained, adding that repeated displacement had made the situation even more acute, with families moving "5, 6, 7, 8 times to different locations in Gaza."

 

In that sense, orphanhood in Gaza often means losing not just a mother or father, but the wider structure of care that makes childhood possible.

 

It is also changing the shape of family life for those who remain. Many households, he said, have effectively become single-mother households overnight, with widowed mothers or female relatives trying to hold together families under bombardment, hunger and displacement.

 

That is the landscape in which Taawon has launched its new report and orphan care initiative, aimed at drawing together the main actors working on the issue and forcing a clearer reckoning with the scale of the emergency. 

 

"The intention was to really bring the actors in this whole space together to understand also the scale of the problem, the scale of the intervention, and what is needed to really bring care to orphan children in Gaza," Dr Tareq said.

 

Taawon currently has around 21,000 orphans under its care, Dr Tareq added, yet even that is "not a match to the scale of the crisis."

 

The organisation has long run programmes for children orphaned in previous Israeli assaults, but the need now has outstripped not only individual organisations, but almost every system meant to protect children.

 

 

 

 

One of the most haunting examples is the category WCNSF — "wounded child, no surviving family" — coined by medical workers for children arriving injured and alone.

 

Dr Tareq said that around 1,000 such cases were registered at one point in the war, with roughly 50 under Taawon's care. 

 

The acronym is clinical, but the reality behind it is not: children surviving an air strike or bombardment only to discover there is no parent or relative left to receive them.

 

For some of these children, even leaving Gaza for urgent treatment becomes a bureaucratic dead end.

 

"We're trying to work with the other actors to really bring this to find a solution," Dr Tareq told The New Arab. "It's called an intermediate solution because some of these kids, if the child has an opportunity to travel outside Gaza for medical — it's called medical evacuation cases — there's no legal guardian to sign on the paper."

 

The phrase he used for such children was stark: they are living in a "legal limbo and vacuum."

 

In that sense, Gaza's orphan crisis is not only a humanitarian emergency, but also a bureaucratic one, exposing how quickly war can push children outside the categories that aid agencies, hospitals and legal systems are equipped to handle.

 

 

 

 

The practical obstacles begin with Israel's war on the besieged enclave and the damage it has inflicted on every layer of civilian life.

 

"The continuous situation is affecting us the most in terms of delivery of certain services, particularly advanced health care needs of some of the children – not only orphan children, but the entire population of Gaza," Dr Tareq said.

 

"But in terms of the care infrastructure, we are relying on community-based organisations to deliver a basic set of services… food, clothing, hygiene kits, etc."

 

He described a situation in which almost every support mechanism that might help an orphaned child has itself been wrecked by war.

 

"The context in Gaza today is rather unique in the sense that the supporting mechanism for all the other types of services is also destroyed," he said.

 

"We're doing everything from zero basically because of the destruction of the healthcare system, education system, community centres, all those aspects of care that facilitate the provision of dignified care to the orphan children."

 

Education has become one of the hardest fronts.

 

"I think the difficult part now we're facing is really bringing education to all these orphan children," Dr Tareq said. "The entire schooling system collapsed with the destruction of schools and conversion of many of these schools into temporary housing."

 

In response, he said, Taawon and other actors have tried to build temporary learning centres and safe spaces "where they can rejoin the learning journey, but also as a form of healing and provision of psychosocial support and care and mental support to the families."

 

Displacement makes even that difficult.

 

Families have been forced to move repeatedly, and children can disappear from view as caregivers, relatives and locations change.

 

"This is precisely one of the issues we highlighted in the report: the need for every child to be visible, protected, and supported over time," Dr Tareq said. 

 

He said Taawon works through nearly 15 community-based organisations across Gaza so that, "when a child moves from one locality to another locality, we transfer the case to that sort of community-based partner that we work with" to continue support.

 

Even so, he was blunt about the weaknesses of the wider response.

 

"It's not that there is no response, but it's fragmented, it needs coordination, it's inadequate," he said. "Our call to action through this study is: we need a national registry of all the cases documented, and a better coordination mechanism so that we can ensure every child is visible, protected, and cared for all the time."

 

 

 

 

If the immediate challenge is keeping children fed, sheltered and medically treated, the deeper challenge is the trauma they are carrying.

 

"We have noticed from the beginning, from the onset, quite a lot of cases of children that are in shock, trauma, speech deficiencies, and with an inability to react," Dr Tareq said.

 

Some of the burden has fallen onto children themselves. He spoke of young boys and girls forced into adult roles after losing parents, becoming the main source of responsibility for younger siblings.

 

"All this really creates tremendous trauma," he said, "in addition to the constant noise of war and bombing."

 

That, he said, is one reason Taawon incorporated a component focused specifically on delicate mental health cases, alongside mentoring and coaching for caregivers.

 

The organisation says the scale and particularity of the crisis forced it to rethink its older model of orphan care and introduce a "Gaza 360 care model, where it's not only the provision of basic needs, basic necessities, but also healthcare, education, social protection, and psychosocial support to make sure that every child is protected and cared for in the right way."

 

Within that model, temporary learning centres are meant to do more than restore lessons.

 

"Temporary learning centres are not only about learning," he said, "but it's also about healing, giving them a space to collectively heal, to share their trauma, and to rediscover part of their childhood by simply playing."

 

In a war that has pushed children into bereavement, displacement and premature adulthood, the act of playing can itself become a fragile form of recovery.

 

For Dr Tareq, the trauma of Gaza's orphans cannot be understood as a single event.

 

"These are the children, the sons and daughters of families that have been in siege for over 40 years – a place that is constantly exposed to war and attacks and violence. And so the trauma, the nature of the trauma, there needs a particular approach," he explained. 

 

That is why, he said, Taawon is thinking long term, with an orphan care programme designed to last 18 years and accompany children into adulthood.

 

That long horizon also shapes how he wants these children to be seen.

 

"From the beginning, we're seeing this is not a short-term emergency response program for charity care because this is investing in the future generation of Gaza," he said.

 

"The philosophy, the programme, and the design of it is to ensure that the orphan children are cared for in a comprehensive manner, dignified manner, supported in a way that empowers them."

 

That is perhaps the report's most important argument. Gaza's orphan crisis is not only about emergency relief, but about whether children who have lost almost everything will still be treated as rights-holders with futures, rather than as the inevitable human residue of endless war.

 

 

 

 

Agnese Boffano is a journalist at The New Arab, with previous experience in breaking news and OSINT investigations across the Middle East. She graduated with a master's degree in International Journalism from City University in 2021.   - (ANA) - 

 

AB/ANA/02 August 2026 - - -