Field Reports
Gaza's ministry counts 64,000 orphans while relatives absorb most of them
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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Gaza has no orphanage system capable of holding the number of children the war produced. What is holding them instead is the Palestinian extended family, and it is doing it without a budget line.
The Palestinian Ministry of Social Development recorded more than 64,000 orphans in the Gaza Strip in April, of whom more than 55,000 had lost both parents or the family breadwinner.
UNICEF's own figures approach the same population from a different angle: more than 19,000 children orphaned, and more than 58,000 who have lost one or both parents. The agency puts the number of children who are unaccompanied or separated from their families at at least 17,000, and says the real figure is probably higher.
Who is actually raising them#
A United Nations survey found 41 percent of families in Gaza caring for children who were not their own — a share the researchers noted was more than eight times the rate normally seen in emergencies.
That is kinship care: an aunt, a grandmother, an older cousin, absorbing children into a household that in most cases has itself been displaced and has lost its income.
Adoption is not permitted in Gaza. The available frameworks are kinship care and kafala, both of which place the child with a family rather than an institution, and both of which depend on a household having room, food and standing.
41 percent of Gaza's families are raising children who are not their own.
More than eight times the rate researchers normally record in an emergency
The gap the agencies name#
The International Rescue Committee has warned of an alarming gap in care for unaccompanied and separated children in Gaza — not an absence of willing relatives, but an absence of the identification, tracing, registration and support that turns a willing relative into a stable guardianship.
UNICEF and its partners have asked urgently for support to the families already carrying these children, and for alternative arrangements for adolescents, who are the hardest group to place and the easiest to lose track of.
Tracing is the quiet, decisive work. A child recorded as unaccompanied may have surviving relatives somewhere in the Strip or outside it, and reuniting them is a documentation problem in a place where the documents, the registries and often the buildings that held them are gone.
What this asks of the reconstruction plans#
Every framework now being negotiated for Gaza — the roadmap, the stabilisation force, the reconstruction fund — is written about territory, weapons and money.
None of them has a chapter on 64,000 children whose guardianship arrangements are being improvised inside tents by relatives with no allowance, no school place guaranteed and, in tens of thousands of cases, no house.
The families are doing the work regardless. What they are owed is registration, a caseworker, and a cash transfer that recognises a household of five became a household of nine — the least expensive item on any reconstruction list, and the one that is not on it.
