Gaza in ruins: how Israel’s two-year assault has devastated the territory / No family, no stability, no social fabric: the anguish of Gaza’s wounded orphans

IDF’s bombs and ground offensive have killed tens of thousands of people and reduced entire cities to rubble. As the number of WCNSFs – ‘wounded child, no surviving family’ – grows, charities struggle to find adults to look after them

A UN commission report concluded Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza

Jason Burke

The majority of those killed by Israel’s offensive in the strip have been civilians, and the overall total now exceeds 67,000. Entire families have been wiped out in a single airstrike. Sometimes, only a single individual, frequently a child, is left alive. There are also nearly 170,000 injured. In all, casualties amount to roughly 10% of Gaza’s pre-war population of 2.3 million.

Three-month-old baby Rim was the sole survivor of an Israeli strike on the home of the Abu Hiyye family in Khan Younis. Rim has been taken in by her aunt. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty

There may well be many more dead uncounted in the rubble that now covers much of Gaza. Those killed by untreated illnesses, poor nutrition, suicide or other causes linked to the conflict are more numerous still. Thousands of people have simply disappeared – lost, incinerated or blown apart by explosions, or held in secret detention by Israel.

Below is a summary of the cost of the war for Gaza and its people.

67,074 Palestinians killed in Gaza

168,716 Palestinians injured in Gaza

More than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed inside Gaza by Israeli attacks. Most are civilians. At least 20,000 are children – about 2% of Gaza’s child population. More than 168,000 have been wounded, many suffering injuries of a type and scale more usually associated with professional soldiers in intense combat, according to one recent medical study.

Many other Palestinians have been killed by hunger, lack of shelter and medication, accidents, the rapid spread of infectious diseases and the collapse of the healthcare system. Life expectancy in Gaza may have decreased by up to a half in the first year of the conflict, according to a study in the respected medical journal the Lancet.

Israel has controlled and restricted supplies going into Gaza throughout the conflict but imposed a total blockade of supplies from March to May 2025, saying that Hamas was stealing assistance to pay for its military operations. Though restrictions were eventually eased amid international outrage, famine was declared in parts of Gaza in August….

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2025/oct/07/the-ruin-of-gaza-how-israel-two-year-assault-has-devastated-the-territory

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Ruins, rubble and famine: The human cost of Israel’s war in Gaza | Photos

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No family, no stability, no social fabric: the anguish of Gaza’s wounded orphans

Within a few months, the war in Gaza had already made its own addition to the vocabulary of emergency medical assistance with the world’s most heartbreaking acronym: WCNSF, “wounded child, no surviving family”.

Over two years of bombardment and famine the problem has worsened, even though in the constant chaos created by Israeli bombing and evacuation orders, which fragment communities and scatter them around the Gaza Strip, it is hard to keep track of children separated from their families.

The UN’s child protection agency, Unicef, cited Gaza health ministry statistics from early September, recording 2,596 children who had lost both parents, and a further 53,724 who had lost either their father (47,804) or mother (5,920).

There is no data on how many parentless children have also been wounded, but, even as the first phase of a ceasefire deal to end the long war was agreed on Thursday, Gaza has the highest rate of child amputations of any modern conflict.

On 13 August, a three-year-old girl, Wesam, was asleep with her five-year-old brother, Zuheir, her pregnant mother, Nour, her father, Moatassem, and her grandparents, when the family house in Gaza City was bombed. Wesam was the only survivor, but sustained serious wounds to her leg and abdomen, including a lacerated liver and kidney, and severe psychological trauma.

Unicef said she was in “urgent need of medical evacuation abroad for advanced treatment, particularly to save her left leg from the risk of amputation”.

The Israeli onslaught on Gaza has left thousands of children like Wesam in its wake – alone and often critically wounded. There are so many such children that overworked trauma surgeons simply scrawl WCNSF on their files.

“It is the first conflict that such a term was needed,” said Kieran King, the humanitarian head of War Child, a UK-based charity and one of the organisations trying to protect and care for wounded orphans in Gaza. “It was born out of the emergency medical teams, people who have worked across every conflict since forever, and coined this term WCNSF because they’d never had to deal with the child protection challenge on this scale.”….

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/10/no-family-stability-social-fabric-harm-inflicted-gaza-children-incalculable

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Dogs of war / New acronym in Gaza: WCNSF – Wounded Child No Surviving Family

Two years after the massacre, I look back in disbelief. I, too, missed the October 8 surprise / ‘If 1948 was a war of Independence, the current war could be the one that ends Israel’

519 out of 533 in US House of Representatives voted to continue sponsoring the Mass Murder of 2.4 millon Palestinians