18,500 were children.
This is one of the wars Trump said he'd stop with a phone call the first day.
He's 190 days behind schedule now.
Some were killed in their beds. Others while playing. Many were buried before they learned to walk.
Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Palestinian children have been killed at a rate of more than one child per hour during the war. “Consider that for a moment. A whole classroom of children killed, every day for nearly two years,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell told the U.N. Security Council this month.
When asked about the death toll among children, the Israel Defense Forces said it “does not target children or other uninvolved civilians. The IDF takes extensive precautionary measures to prevent harm to civilians. The IDF operates in compliance with international law.”
Israel says its aim is to eliminate Hamas after the militant group attacked the country on Oct. 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking 251 hostages. Thirty-eight children were killed and about three dozen were taken hostage. Hamas continues to hold about 22 hostages and the bodies of 27 others.
To assemble its list of fatalities, the Gaza Health Ministry uses hospital and morgue records, as well as vetted reports from victims’ families and reliable media. Tracking and identifying the dead has become increasingly difficult amid the breakdown of the enclave’s medical system.
Though it is impossible to capture every death, Gaza’s Health Ministry is doing “unusually high-quality real-time casualty recording,” said Michael Spagat, an economics professor at the University of London and chair of Every Casualty Counts, an international charity focused on documenting the casualties of armed conflict.
“They are trying to be really careful and rigorous and are constantly trying to improve the list,” he said.
A peer-reviewed study published January in the Lancet said an analysis of different casualty records suggests that the official death toll could be a significant undercount.
The Washington Post analyzed the ministry’s list released on July 15 and sorted the names by age.
1 year old 943
2 years old 972
3 years old 899
4 years old 868
5 years old 985
6 years old 924
7 years old 967
8 years old 895
9 years old 921
10 years old 907
11 years old 976
12 years old 1,001
13 years old 1,084
14 years old 1,132
15 years old 1,064
16 years old 1,212
17 years old 1,218
Moween Shuheiber, 6, dreamed of being a pediatrician for children injured in war. Other days he wanted to be a businessman with a luxury car. Loved ones saw him as mature and thoughtful. He was killed in a November 2023 strike on an apartment building that killed more than 30 people, his cousin Adham Shuheiber said.
“I think he breathed his last while covering his ears,” said his cousin Malak Shuheiber. “Because that’s what he did every time he heard the sounds of planes.”
Tens of thousands more children have suffered life-altering injuries.
Samer Attar, an American surgeon who has volunteered in Gaza on several medical missions, says he has seen young bodies charred beyond recognition. Others had missing limbs or massive head trauma — wounds he described as “physically disabling and emotionally scarring.”
In early April, at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, Attar recalled dozens of patients on the floor after an attack. The hospital had long since run out of beds. He described seeing a 10-year-old patient take her last gasp as blood poured from her mouth and nostrils. A young boy had his skull and abdomen partly ripped open. Two of his brothers were there next to him, begging doctors to help.
“I grabbed one brother’s hand and gave him the child’s hand. I took his other brother’s hand and put it on his heart, and just said, ‘I’m sorry he’s going to die. Just wait here until he passes,’” Attar remembered telling them before moving on to the next patient.
Most of the living have been corralled into the south of the Gaza Strip, where aid is now mostly distributed by American contractors inside military zones. Israeli soldiers positioned nearby have repeatedly opened fire on desperate families seeking aid, witnesses have told The Post. The IDF has said it fired “warning shots” to prevent “suspects from approaching.” It added that after reports of harm to civilians at aid points, the Israeli military issued instructions “following lessons learned” to forces in the field.
More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while trying to get food, the U.N. human rights office said on July 22.
On July 13, an Israeli airstrike hit a crowd lining up to fill water containers in central Gaza. Ten people, most of them children, were killed.
The Israeli military called it a “technical error” with a munition that caused it to fall “dozens of meters from the target.”
Thirsty children “returned to their homes as lifeless corpses,” said Ramadan Nassar, who lives in the area and witnessed the aftermath.
WaPo goes on to list all the names of kids who've been killed in Israel's "war against Hamas", which has turned into an attempted genocide.
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