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Early in the Gaza war, a 9-year-old Palestinian boy lost his mother, father and two siblings in an Israeli airstrike. A few months later, he, too, was killed.
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The story begins when 9-year-old Khaled Joudeh suffered unimaginable loss. His parents, brother, sister and dozens of other relatives were killed in an Israeli airstrike.
In the months that followed, Khaled tried to stay brave, his uncle, Mohammed Faris, recalled. He would comfort his younger brother, Tamer, who, like Khaled, survived the Oct. 22 attack that killed his entire family. But Tamer, 7, was badly injured, with broken backs and legs, and was in constant pain.
“When his brother cried, he was always there to comfort him,” Faris told reporters. The New York Times In a recent telephone interview. “He would tell him, ‘Mommy and Daddy are in heaven. If Mommy and Daddy knew we were crying for them, they would be sad.'”
At night, when Israel launched another relentless airstrike on Gaza, Khaled would wake up shaking and screaming, sometimes running to his uncle for comfort.
It was a brief but terrifying time for the young brothers, but on January 9, another airstrike hit the family home where they had taken refuge, killing Khaled, Tamer, their two-year-old cousin Nada and three other relatives, according to two family members.
Their stories epitomize the devastating toll that Gaza’s ten-month war has taken on children caught up in the conflict.
After Hamas-led militants attacked Israel on October 7, the Israeli military launched one of the world’s most intense air strikes in this century against the densely populated Gaza Strip with the goal of destroying Hamas. Israel accused Hamas of using Gaza’s urban terrain to provide additional protection for its militants and weapons infrastructure, digging tunnels under residential areas, firing rockets near civilian homes, and taking hostages in the city center.
Hamas denies the charges and says its members are residents of Gaza and live among the local population.
International law experts say Israel has a duty to protect civilians, even if Hamas exploits them as Israel says it has. The Israeli military says it took “all feasible precautions” to mitigate harm to civilians.
Children in Gaza have suffered in all kinds of ways. Of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed in the war, about 15,000 were under the age of 18, according to Gaza health officials. The United Nations estimates that at least 19,000 children have been orphaned. UNICEF says nearly 1 million children have been displaced.
“Gaza remains the most dangerous place in the world for children,” said Jonathan Cricks, a UNICEF spokesman.
Most children live in overcrowded homes, with multiple families crammed together, or in dilapidated tents, where the summer heat can feel like an oven, with no running water or sanitation. Thousands are severely malnourished and at risk of starvation.
The United Nations called for a one-week ceasefire in Gaza on Friday to allow for vaccinations against a polio outbreak, saying many children were at risk, the same day Gaza’s health ministry confirmed the first case of polio in the region in years.
In Gaza, where survival is a constant struggle, children must lend a hand.
Cricks said he rarely saw children playing or laughing when he visited the area a few months ago. Instead, he saw them mostly helping their families: carrying jugs of water from gas stations, searching for food and helping carry the few belongings their families had when they were displaced.
Crick said he once saw a boy who looked no older than 5 years old on the street, pushing a wheelchair with two oil drums full of water on it. The handles of the wheelchair were higher than the boy’s head, and he could hardly see where he was going.
“There is no childhood in Gaza,” Louise Watridge, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, the main UN aid agency for Palestinians, wrote on social media last month. “Malnutrition and exhaustion. Sleeping in rubble or under plastic sheets. Wearing the same clothes for nine months. Education replaced by fear and loss. Loss of lives, homes and stability,” she added.
Throughout the war, parents did everything they could to protect their children.
They wrote their children’s names directly on their skin so they could be identified if they were lost, orphaned, or killed. In the morgue, the shroud was cut into small pieces and used to wrap the smallest victims. Sometimes, the body of a child was wrapped in the same shroud as the parents and placed on the parents’ chests.
Some parents quietly said that if their children were killed, they at least wanted them to die whole and have someone to bury them.
In the first weeks of the conflict, families began preparing for the worst. Faris said Khaled’s father told relatives that if any of them were killed, those who survived must protect and educate the children.
Shortly thereafter, on October 22, Israeli air strikes destroyed two buildings where Khaled’s extended family lived in the central Gaza town of Deir el-Balah, according to relatives and local journalists.
Khaled and Tamer are the only survivors from their immediate families. Their two-year-old cousin, Nada, is the only survivor from the first attack from her immediate family.
Just after the October strike ended, dozens of bodies wrapped in shrouds lay on the ground in the morgue yard. Khalid was barefoot and crying, kissing the faces of his parents and siblings, bidding a final sad farewell.
According to three relatives of Khalid at the time, a total of 68 members of Khalid’s extended family were killed in their sleep that day and were buried side by side in a mass grave.
After their parents were killed, Khaled and Tamer lived with their uncle Faris in another family building in Deir al-Balah for nearly a month. Khaled, Tamer and Nada occasionally went to play in the ruined streets.
“They are still children and will try to keep their childhood alive,” Farris said. “They will play outside when it’s calm. But the airstrikes tend to send them screaming back,” he added.
“He would come quickly and hide near me,” Faris said of Khalid.
Then, on January 9, Khalid’s short life ended.
According to Faris and another relative, Yasmeen Joudeh, 36, an Israeli airstrike hit the house where the family had taken refuge at around 2 a.m. while they were sleeping. Khaled, Tamer and Nada were killed, along with their two uncles and grandfather.
The body of his grandfather, who had recently returned to live with them, was found on the street. Jude, who was in Egypt at the time, said he survived and staggered out of the bombed building with Nada’s body in his arms. He later heard details from relatives in Gaza.
The Times It was months later that I learned of Khalid’s death.
When asked about the reasons for the attacks on Joudeh’s home in October and January, the Israeli military did not give a reason.
Regarding the October attack, the military said only that it could not answer questions about the attack on the family.
After the January attack, The New York Times provided the Israeli military with the date, time and street location of the attack. But the military said The New York Times “did not provide the IDF with sufficient information to properly investigate the alleged attack” and requested coordinates to identify the location of the building that was hit.
Faris said his extended family had no ties to any of the Palestinian militant groups Israel claimed to be targeting in the Gaza war.
“They have nothing to do with anything,” he said.
Like the rest of their family members and many other Gaza residents since then, the three children, their grandfather and two uncles were buried in an unmarked grave.
This article was originally published on The New York Times.
By Raja Abdulrahim
Photo: Samar Abu Elouf
©2024 The New York Times
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