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The most pressing issue is simply to locate children. Many in Gaza are alone when they pass through checkpoints or show up at hospitals, leaving them at yet more risk. UNICEF aims to make hospitals one-stop hubs, where they can arrange custody and provide mental and physical health care.
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UNICEF is trying to formalize legal guardianships for the newly orphaned and keep records of them — efforts that officials admit are proceeding very slowly. The week-long pause in fighting gave UNICEF time to track down just three unaccompanied children in Gaza and connect them with services. The lack of consistent cellphone service and power for charging devices has made it difficult for UNICEF to work and hard for the nonprofit Palestine Children’s Relief Fund to stay in touch with the children it serves who were orphaned by the 2014 war.
The scales of displacement in Israel and Gaza are very different. Up to 1.8 million Gazans and up to a quarter-million Israelis have left their homes since the Oct. 7 attacks.
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But the efforts to rehouse Israeli families set a bar for what Gazan children deserve. The government of Israel is paying for refugees to live in unused hotel rooms, sometimes resettling entire kibbutzim and towns together. As the school-aged population of the Dead Sea region swelled from 500 to 3,000, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee opened schools. One for children with additional needs is located in a repurposed spa.
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Chief executive Ariel Zwang told me that schools, like most institutions in the attacked communities, suffered losses: “Where’s the kindergarten teacher? Gone. Where’s the assistant kindergarten teacher? Her parents were murdered and she’s with her family.” But because whole towns were evacuated together, some teachers have returned to the classroom to give their students a sense of normality.
In Gaza, “there are no children,” said PCRF founder Steve Sosebee, speaking to the devastation young people have seen and experienced. “There are physical children, two-year-olds running around among rubble,” but no one experiencing childish innocence or normality. U.N. schools are sheltering 1.2 million people, making formal education in the area largely impossible. UNICEF is providing recreation programs for Gazan children, as well as food, water and shelter. In the midst of the humanitarian cataclysm, the opportunity to play is itself a form of aid, an investment in resilience and mental well-being.
That’s essential: Experts agree that children in Israel and Gaza need dedicated and sustained mental health care.
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Some cheap, simple things can help. Organizations such as the Children and War Foundation have developed interventions that can be delivered by school counselors, teachers and even parents. These are low-cost, scientifically robust and rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy. The group’s “Teaching Recovery Techniques” curriculum has been used with Palestinian children in the West Bank and with Syrian refugee children and parents in Lebanon. It gives people practical ways to recognize and manage intense or overwhelming responses to trauma.
Ensuring that children have a loving caregiver is key to their rehabilitation — one of the many reasons it’s crucial to connect orphans with extended family or neighbors. These adults provide immediate physical protection and can reinforce the lessons imparted by short-term therapy programs.
The children of this conflict need ongoing treatment for their physical wounds, too. In early December, PCRF’s Sosebee told me that 900 children in Gaza had fresh amputations, often performed in the worst of conditions. They might need more operations and to have prostheses refitted as they grow. Similarly, pediatric burn victims, lacking skin grafts, will need further surgery to manage scar tissue.
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Organizations such as PCRF have worked for years to get children from Gaza access to medical treatment elsewhere in the world. But the bureaucracy required to get travel documents for children is in a shambles. And the scale of need created by this war will likely outstrip that capacity. Gazan families need functioning hospitals, surgeons, specialists and care coordinators.
Ultimately, when rebuilding does begin, both in Gaza and in the Israeli communities devastated on Oct. 7, reconstruction should put the needs of children first.
In Gaza, that will mean clearing unexploded ordnance that will be a danger long after hostilities cease, and reducing lead pollution hotspots that have been a risk to children for years. It must involve building more school capacity: Before the current war, many U.N. schools were educating children in shifts, and the average class size was 41.2 children. As with previous conflicts, this war will be a mass disabling event, so new buildings and transit infrastructure will need to be designed with accessibility in mind.
The thing kids need most to recover from conflict is the thing conflict itself undermines: stability. More than righteous sympathy, the world owes the children of Israel and Gaza another chance at childhood.
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The plight of children kidnapped and murdered by Hamas and killed in Israel’s attacks on Gaza has stirred worldwide outrage, and justly so.
Whatever the political outcome of the conflict, the children who survive in the region will have immense — and specific — long-term needs. Already, child welfare organizations are doing what they can to help, using insights gleaned from treating children in conflicts there and elsewhere. This urgent humanitarian aid needs support from those watching in horror from afar. And governments around the world must pledge a massive investment in caring for young Gazans and Israelis.
The most pressing issue is simply to locate children. Many in Gaza are alone when they pass through checkpoints or show up at hospitals, leaving them at yet more risk. UNICEF aims to make hospitals one-stop hubs, where they can arrange custody and provide mental and physical health care.
UNICEF is trying to formalize legal guardianships for the newly orphaned and keep records of them — efforts that officials admit are proceeding very slowly. The week-long pause in fighting gave UNICEF time to track down just three unaccompanied children in Gaza and connect them with services. The lack of consistent cellphone service and power for charging devices has made it difficult for UNICEF to work and hard for the nonprofit Palestine Children’s Relief Fund to stay in touch with the children it serves who were orphaned by the 2014 war.
The scales of displacement in Israel and Gaza are very different. Up to 1.8 million Gazans and up to a quarter-million Israelis have left their homes since the Oct. 7 attacks.
But the efforts to rehouse Israeli families set a bar for what Gazan children deserve. The government of Israel is paying for refugees to live in unused hotel rooms, sometimes resettling entire kibbutzim and towns together. As the school-aged population of the Dead Sea region swelled from 500 to 3,000, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee opened schools. One for children with additional needs is located in a repurposed spa.
Chief executive Ariel Zwang told me that schools, like most institutions in the attacked communities, suffered losses: “Where’s the kindergarten teacher? Gone. Where’s the assistant kindergarten teacher? Her parents were murdered and she’s with her family.” But because whole towns were evacuated together, some teachers have returned to the classroom to give their students a sense of normality.
In Gaza, “there are no children,” said PCRF founder Steve Sosebee, speaking to the devastation young people have seen and experienced. “There are physical children, two-year-olds running around among rubble,” but no one experiencing childish innocence or normality. U.N. schools are sheltering 1.2 million people, making formal education in the area largely impossible. UNICEF is providing recreation programs for Gazan children, as well as food, water and shelter. In the midst of the humanitarian cataclysm, the opportunity to play is itself a form of aid, an investment in resilience and mental well-being.
That’s essential: Experts agree that children in Israel and Gaza need dedicated and sustained mental health care.
Some cheap, simple things can help. Organizations such as the Children and War Foundation have developed interventions that can be delivered by school counselors, teachers and even parents. These are low-cost, scientifically robust and rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy. The group’s “Teaching Recovery Techniques” curriculum has been used with Palestinian children in the West Bank and with Syrian refugee children and parents in Lebanon. It gives people practical ways to recognize and manage intense or overwhelming responses to trauma.
Ensuring that children have a loving caregiver is key to their rehabilitation — one of the many reasons it’s crucial to connect orphans with extended family or neighbors. These adults provide immediate physical protection and can reinforce the lessons imparted by short-term therapy programs.
The children of this conflict need ongoing treatment for their physical wounds, too. In early December, PCRF’s Sosebee told me that 900 children in Gaza had fresh amputations, often performed in the worst of conditions. They might need more operations and to have prostheses refitted as they grow. Similarly, pediatric burn victims, lacking skin grafts, will need further surgery to manage scar tissue.
Organizations such as PCRF have worked for years to get children from Gaza access to medical treatment elsewhere in the world. But the bureaucracy required to get travel documents for children is in a shambles. And the scale of need created by this war will likely outstrip that capacity. Gazan families need functioning hospitals, surgeons, specialists and care coordinators.
Ultimately, when rebuilding does begin, both in Gaza and in the Israeli communities devastated on Oct. 7, reconstruction should put the needs of children first.
In Gaza, that will mean clearing unexploded ordnance that will be a danger long after hostilities cease, and reducing lead pollution hotspots that have been a risk to children for years. It must involve building more school capacity: Before the current war, many U.N. schools were educating children in shifts, and the average class size was 41.2 children. As with previous conflicts, this war will be a mass disabling event, so new buildings and transit infrastructure will need to be designed with accessibility in mind.
The thing kids need most to recover from conflict is the thing conflict itself undermines: stability. More than righteous sympathy, the world owes the children of Israel and Gaza another chance at childhood.
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