17,000 Gaza children separated from families amid war, says UN

At least 17,000 children in the Gaza Strip are estimated to have been left unaccompanied or separated from their families nearly four months into the war between Israel and Hamas, the United Nations Children’s agency said on Friday.

Nearly all children in the strip also require mental health support, UNICEF said.

“Each [child] has a heartbreaking story of loss and grief,” said Jonathan Crickx, UNICEF’s chief of communication for the occupied Palestinian territories, reports Al Jazeera.

“This [17,000] figure corresponds to 1 per cent of the overall displaced population – 1.7 million people,” he told a media briefing via video link from Jerusalem.

Crickx said that the figure was an estimation as it is near impossible to verify information under current conditions, adding that each one “is a child who is coming to terms with a horrible new reality”.

Crickx said that tracing who the unaccompanied children were was proving “extremely difficult”, as they were sometimes brought to a hospital wounded or in shock, and “they simply can’t even say their names”.

He said that during conflicts, it was common for extended families to take care of children who lost their parents.

However, in Gaza, “due to the sheer lack of food, water or shelter, extended families are themselves distressed and face challenges to immediately take care of another child as they themselves are struggling to cater for their own children and family”, said Crickx.

Broadly, UNICEF terms separated children as those who are without their parents, while unaccompanied children are those who are separated and also without other relatives.

He said the mental health of children in Gaza was being severely affected by the war, and that a million children in the Gaza Strip require mental health support.

Children in Gaza “present symptoms like extremely high levels of persistent anxiety, loss of appetite, they can’t sleep, they have emotional outbursts or panic every time they hear the bombings,” Crickx explained.

Before the assault erupted, UNICEF estimated that more than 500,000 children in Gaza needed mental health and psycho-social support.

Now, it believes that “almost all children are in need” of such help. “That’s more than one million children,” Crickx said. “Children don’t have anything to do with this conflict. Yet they are suffering like no child should ever suffer,” he said. “No child should ever be exposed to the level of violence seen on October 7 – or to the level of violence that we have witnessed since then.”

Crickx also called for a ceasefire so that UNICEF could conduct a proper count of children who are unaccompanied or separated, trace relatives, and deliver mental health support.

According to the Palestinian health ministry, Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed more than 27,100 people in Gaza since the war began on October 7, around 11,500 of them children.

More than 66,200 others have been wounded and thousands more are missing and are under the rubble.