Gaza Ministry Counts 54,468 Orphaned Children as Widows Split Care Costs

The Palestinian Ministry of Social Development in Gaza has registered 54,468 children who lost one or both parents since October 2023. The territory counts at least 64,000 widows and 71,000 orphaned children overall, a figure that includes people bereaved in earlier Israeli military campaigns. The ministry's registry also lists about 3,000 children without a registered guardian, custodian or caregiver.

Mariam, 16, Aya, 14, and Jebril, 12, move between aunts' tents every two days. Their father died during Israel's 2014 offensive. Their Gaza City home was destroyed after the war began in 2023, and they sheltered with their mother, Islam, in a makeshift tent in Deir al-Balah. On the nineteenth day after the ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, an Israeli bomb struck the tent and killed her in front of the children. Jebril sat in her lap when the bomb hit and was injured.

Aunt Warda al-Muzeini said the children have no stable home. They stay mostly with their paternal grandmother, then rotate among maternal aunts, two nights at each house. Muzeini lost her husband in an Israeli air strike and raises four children alone with no job or reliable income. She said she struggles to provide one meal a day. Another aunt is also a widow. The sisters divide costs: one buys pyjamas, another slippers, another supplies pocket money for a couple of days.

Ministry spokesperson Aziza al-Kahlout said the totals do not show what families go through daily. A child who loses both parents loses care and safety, she said, and is also deprived of education and childhood, carrying responsibilities beyond their years. Women who become a family's sole breadwinners face providing for children while raising them amid destruction. Kahlout warned of "deeply alarming signs of growing risks of child labour, school dropout and early marriage in Gaza," driven by poverty, displacement and the loss of family breadwinners. She said orphaned children face these risks as economic and humanitarian conditions worsen and shelter stays scarce.

Some children lost their entire family. Wafaa al-Attar, now 13, was 10 when she left home on 22 February 2024 to charge her father's phone at an uncle's house nearby. A blast struck as she approached the door. "I turned around, and our home was no longer there," she said. The air strike on the multi-storey building in Deir al-Balah killed her father, Ahmed, her mother, Khouloud, and four siblings: Rital, 8, Muhammed, 5, Obada, 3, and Yazan, 9 months. Attar suffered minor shrapnel injuries and was taken to hospital. She stayed first with grandparents, then with an uncle, his wife and their newborn. "For months, I wished I had been with them in the house when it was bombed. I wished I had been killed with them," she said. "But of course, I know that no one could ever replace my own family." She is enrolled in the ministry's registry.