Gaza war leaves tens of thousands of children without parents as widows struggle to cope

Every two days, three siblings in Gaza pack up and move from one aunt's tent to another. Mariam, 16, Aya, 14, and Jebril, 12, have followed this routine since they were orphaned days into last year's ceasefire.

The Abu Asser children had already lost their father during Israel's 2014 offensive on Gaza. When their Gaza City home was destroyed during the war that began in 2023, they took shelter with their mother, Islam, in a makeshift tent in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza. On the nineteenth day after the ceasefire took effect on 10 October 2025, an Israeli bomb hit the tent and killed her in front of them.

The Palestinian Ministry of Social Development in Gaza says the siblings are among 54,468 children who have lost one or both parents since October 2023. Across the territory, there are at least 64,000 widows and 71,000 orphaned children, a count that includes people bereaved in earlier Israeli military attacks on Gaza. The ministry's orphan registration system also shows around 3,000 children with no registered guardian, custodian or caregiver.

Their aunt Warda al-Muzeini told Middle East Eye that the children have no stable home. They mostly stay with their paternal grandmother but rotate between their maternal aunts, spending two nights with each. Jebril was sitting in his mother's lap when the bomb struck and was injured himself. "He saw his mother die in front of him," she said.

Muzeini lost her husband in an Israeli air strike and now raises their four children alone, without a job or reliable income. She says she struggles to provide even one meal a day. Another of the aunts is also a widow. The sisters share the load, with one buying pyjamas, another slippers, and another giving the children enough pocket money for a couple of days.

Ministry spokesperson Aziza al-Kahlout said the numbers do not capture the daily suffering involved. A child who has lost both parents, she said, has lost care and safety and has also been deprived of education and childhood, forced to carry responsibilities far beyond their years. Women who become their families' only breadwinners face the double burden of providing for children and raising them amid devastation.

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 are especially exposed as economic and humanitarian conditions worsen and adequate shelter remains scarce.

Some children lost everyone. Wafaa al-Attar, now 13, was 10 when she left home on 22 February 2024 to charge her father's phone at her uncle's nearby house, which had solar panels. As she was about to go in, a massive blast struck. "I turned around, and our home was no longer there," she said.

The air strike hit the multi-storey building in Deir al-Balah where her family was. It killed her father, Ahmed, her mother, Khouloud, and her four siblings: Rital, eight, Muhammed, five, Obada, three, and nine-month-old Yazan. Attar suffered minor shrapnel injuries and was taken to hospital. She kept asking about her family until her uncle arrived and told her they had died. She fell silent for two or three hours, then wondered: "All of them at once?"

She first stayed with her grandparents and later moved in with her 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. Her uncle's wife comforted her and reminded her that her father would want her to stay strong. "But of course, I know that no one could ever replace my own family," Attar said.