The Generation, Year: 1, Issue: 12
WCNSF is the acronym for Wounded Child No Surviving Family. This was coined by the health professionals in Gaza to refer to the increasing number of children who are wounded and have no caregivers, having lost their families to the genocide being carried out by the Israeli occupation forces since October 7. What kind of a world do we live in, where such acronyms are required to refer to children?
Gaza has no more children left. And we’re not referring to the more than 4,500 children who have been butchered mercilessly by the Israeli apartheid regime in the name of its “right to self-defence”—or the thousands who lay trapped under the rubble of what once used to be.
In more than the 16 years of painful blockade imposed by Israel, the children of Gaza have suffered dehumanisation, debasement, and deprivation at the hands of the occupation forces, resulting in irreparable mental trauma, childhood depression, and major psychological complications.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes, and at least two injured. Since about half of Gaza’s population of about 2.2 million are children, they are easily killed by Israel’s carpet bombing—which does not discriminate between resistance fighters and civilians—which has become a regular fixture of Gazan children’s lives.
Save the Children says that the Gaza War is by far the deadliest conflict for children in recent times, with the daily death toll of children in Gaza being much higher than in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
In the midst of the war, the Ministry of Education in Gaza has been forced to suspend the 2023-24 school year for 625,000 students. But in a land where children are being deprived of their basic rights to life, food, medical care, and security, their loss of education should not come as a surprise.
There is a generation of children growing up in Gaza without family, without love, without limbs, without food, without education, without basic human rights, in unspeakable depravity, scarred by the trauma of war—and all because humanity has failed them, the world has failed them. In Gaza, there are no rights for any child.
This year, as we observe World Children’s Day with the theme “For every child, every right,” we should keep the lost children of Gaza in our thoughts; With every dying child in Gaza, the world is losing a tiny star that could one day have shone light on it.
