From all the disturbing facts and figures on the plight of children in Gaza, harrowing reports emerged over the past five months that left readers shaken to the core amid the genocidal Israeli war.

The story of Aisha for instance, who was born during the war, on December 2 at a hospital in Rafah and 17 days later was killed by an Israeli airstrike along with her 2-year-old brother Ahmed and other family members. 

Aisha’s parents survived with serious injuries, but their baby girl has gone, leaving them scarred for the rest of their lives, which could tragically end at any moment also, considering the rate of Israeli attacks. 

Five-month-old twins Naeim and Wissam were conceived at the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza after three rounds of IVF. Their parents had spent over ten years trying to conceive. 

In March, Naeim and Wissam were killed by an Israeli airstrike along with their father and six other children in Rafah, which is supposedly the safest area in the Gaza Strip at the moment. 

The campaign to find Hind Rajab made global headlines for all the wrong reasons. 

The six-year-old was trying to escape with relatives after the Israeli military ordered people to evacuate northern Gaza when the car they were traveling in came under attack. 

Audio messages of calls between Hind and emergency workers were made public by the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) in a bid to pressure Israeli authorities to allow rescue teams to reach her.   

In the phone call, Hind can be heard begging for help, saying she was hiding from Israeli ground forces between the bodies of five relatives all believed to have been killed, making Hind the only survivor. 

“The tank is next to me. It’s moving,” Hind can be heard saying. 

Rana from the PRC asked: “Is it very close?” 

“Very, very, will you come and get me? I’m so scared.” Hind continued to beg until the line cut off. 

Israeli authorities obstructed efforts to locate Hind, and when an ambulance was finally dispatched from southern Gaza, the PRC lost contact with the ambulance crew in late January. The Israeli military even made it difficult for the PRC to reach own medics. 

12 days after the ambulance was located, it appeared to have been run over by an Israeli tank after being struck by shells, and Hind’s dead body was found nearby. 

Aisha, Naeim, Wissam and Hind are four children who have perished in the brutal Israeli war on Gaza. 

The Israeli military has killed more than 12,550 other children since October 7. 

These are not just numbers. Each child has a name, and they have their own story. 

The number is rising by the day, and thousands of others are believed to be missing presumably dead under the rubble of collapsed buildings. 

In just four months from October 2022 to February 2023, more children had been killed in Gaza than in four years of war around the world, according to the United Nations. 

The head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini said on Tuesday, “This war is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future”. 

UNICEF estimates that at least 17,000 children in Gaza are “now unaccompanied or separated from their families”, and many have experienced life-changing injuries. 

The World Health Organization, like many other aid agencies trying to operate in the enclave, says children are experiencing “severe levels of malnutrition” and a rising number are dying of starvation. 

A senior UN aid official said recently that one-third of children under the age of two in northern Gaza are now acutely malnourished. 

UN agencies have estimated that 180 women are giving birth every day in Gaza, without access to adequate pain medication, food or hygiene products. 

Dehydrated and malnourished, many pregnant women in Gaza face elevated risks of disease that can be transferred to their newborns. 

No parent should endure this type of pain when bringing a child into this world. 

Without a doubt, Gaza is now the worst place on the planet for a child simply trying to survive. 

If children in Gaza do survive the deadly Israeli air and ground assault, they could end up among the 75,000 Palestinians injured. Thousands of children are believed to have sustained serious injuries. Many have lost limbs. 

Even for children considered lucky to have survived death or injury so far, hundreds of thousands of children have been left traumatized for life. 

Indeed, aid agencies are documenting a high number of mental illnesses. War always leaves visible scars on the strongest of men, let alone the most vulnerable, such as children. 

No child should be killed in a war regardless of their background or faith. The staggering number in Gaza speaks volumes about the Israeli execution of this war, which experts say the Israeli leadership knows it has lost. 

It is very likely to backfire on Tel Aviv when considering the majority of the dead and injured in Gaza are women and children. 

Thousands of children have also been orphaned. 

This is part of another significant number of children who will grow up in Gaza with the memories of a genocidal campaign that killed their loved ones: A father, a mother, a sibling, or a very close friend. 

Experts argue that these children will be among the next generation of the armed Palestinian resistance to end the Israeli occupation and the wider struggle for justice and freedom. 

This appears to have been lost in Tel Aviv. 

Nevertheless, the mass killing of children will go down in the history books as an era when the majority of the world spoke out against “the war on children” but took little action to stop it.