The Guardian features Gaza’s children Israeli snipers, bombs, bullets, and starvation killed and still counting

The Guardian has published a special report featuring the names and photographs of 18,457 Palestinian children killed during Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, and the number is still climbing as bombardment continues, making it most extensive and sobering records of child casualties in a modern conflict, for it combines official data with visual documentation and seeks to give individual identity to those who might otherwise remain faceless statistics of war.

By the end of July 2025, Gaza’s Ministry of Health had listed 18,457 children under the age of 18 as victims of direct Israeli attacks, and the deaths spanned nearly two years of continuous bombardment, which equates to a boy or girl being killed every hour since the war began. Children make up nearly one-third of all identified deaths, and their names form a harrowing testament to the scale of loss suffered by Gaza’s families and communities.

The Guardian’s editorial decision to include both names and photographs was shaped by a desire to humanise the statistics and by the limits of space available on the page, for each face and name conveys not only an identity but also a fragment of a family’s story. Many children died alongside siblings, cousins, and friends, and doctors say that even those shot by snipers or drones are often brought into hospitals in groups.

The official list used in the feature is maintained by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, and it is recognised by the United Nations and international agencies as well as by Israel’s military as authoritative, although Israeli politicians often attempt to dismiss or discredit it.

The list includes only those whose bodies were identified and processed through hospitals, ensuring verification and consistency, but these same strict rules mean that the figures do not account for the thousands of people still buried beneath rubble or those who have died indirectly due to starvation and disease.

Health workers and aid agencies warn that the blockade imposed on Gaza has turned essential needs such as food, clean water, and medicine into scarce resources, and the absence of these necessities has become a secondary weapon of destruction.

Starvation has killed at least 150 children, and countless others have died from preventable illnesses such as infections and diarrhoea, while the collapse of the health system has made treatment for diseases like cancer impossible. The United Nations estimates that more than 40,000 children have been injured, and Gaza now has more child amputees than any other place in the world.

Rights groups, genocide scholars, and international observers have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide, for the evidence includes systematic mass killings and deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure essential for survival.

The magnitude of the child casualties far surpasses any seen in the region’s recent history, for Israel’s 2008 operation killed 345 children in 22 days, and the 2014 offensive claimed 548 in 50 days, whereas the current war has taken more than thirty times that number.

Research conducted by the Peace Research Institute Oslo categorises Gaza as an area of “extreme conflict intensity,” since every child in the territory lives within 50 kilometres of events where at least 1,000 people were killed in a single year, and this makes Gaza one of the most dangerous places for children anywhere in the world. According to humanitarian estimates, one in every 50 children who lived in Gaza before the war has now been killed, and no modern conflict has recorded a proportion so high.