Beyond Gaza’s death toll: Countless stories of grieving parents, children

Killed: Over 42,000. Injured: Nearly 100,000. Missing: Over 21,000. Displaced: 1.7 million.

The numbers are as gut-wrenching as they are staggering. Since October 7, 2023, horrific details of death and destruction in Gaza have dominated global headlines as Israel continues to pummel the Palestinian enclave with bombs and bullets.

But beneath the cold numbers lies a quieter story of grief —one that will scar the population for generations to come.

For every child lowered into the earth, a parent’s soul follows, and for every parent who has made it out of the rubble, a child is left to wander with half a heart, half a life.

On average, 1 in 43 Palestinians has lost a child, and 1 in 59 has lost a parent to the ongoing Israeli onslaught, revealed a study on “The long-lasting effect of armed conflicts deaths on the living: Quantifying family bereavement” published in Science Advances.

According to the study, the figures could be far greater if they were based on estimates that account for indirect deaths, which could raise the death toll to over 186,000.

Moreover, the analysis does not account for the grief experienced by siblings or extended family members.

‘Violent’ loss

“Bereavement” is defined as the experience of the death of a close relation or friend, characterised by grief, which is the range of emotions people go through after the loss.

Yet, grief caused by war goes beyond the pain of losing a loved one. It is compounded by the trauma of how those losses occur.

“Collective experiences of the violent death of a parent or a child could influence cultural change and perceptions of the conflict,” say the researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, the CED–Centre for Demographic Studies, and the University of Washington.

In Gaza, the brutality of war defines these losses.

For over a year, it has been far from unusual for Palestinian parents to witness their childrens’ lifeless bodies burned beyond recognition, shattered by airstrikes, or nearly flattened beneath rubble, with limbs torn into so many pieces they have to be collected in bags.

Where over 900 families have been completely erased from existence, the number of those who were left behind as the sole survivors runs into thousands.

Survivor’s guilt is felt deeply in the enclave, where each day brings the fall of another home, reduced to rubble and memory.

“There is a repeated displacement, constant fear and witnessing family members literally dismembered before their eyes,” Christopher Lockyear, Secretary General of MSF (Doctors Without Borders) International, told the UN Security Council in February last year.

“These psychological injuries have led children as young as five to tell us that they would prefer to die.”

The situation of grieving parents is no different.

In a video spread online in March, a Palestinian mother was seen begging for her children's lifeless bodies to be kept warm under a blanket after they were killed in the cold by an airstrike:

“I wish I were dead too, so I could go to the grave with them,” she said.

Violent losses like these are known to lead to an increased risk of mental health struggles such as PTSD, prolonged grief disorder, and major depressive episodes.

Yet, for the average Palestinian in Gaza, trauma is not a single event —it is relentless, making the very idea of “post-trauma” a misnomer.

Correspondingly, UNRWA mental health providers in the enclave have reported observing a sharp rise in symptoms of depression, anxiety, and emotional distress, particularly in children, in the first 300 days of the war.

Sleep disturbances, nightmares, emotional numbness, and outbursts of aggression are the visible symptoms of a population enduring trauma without end.

“What’s interesting is that when you meet with these children, they often don’t talk about their feelings. They describe the facts,” says Jonathan Crickx, UNICEF’s top spokesman in the state of Palestine, in an interview with TRT World.

“I was here, I heard the explosion, my uncle took me to the hospital. It’s very factual.”

Those are Crickx’s recollections from his time spent in Gaza, about four months into the war.

There, in a shelter where UNICEF was hosting recreational activities, he met a 10-year-old girl, Razan, who sat motionless, unlike the other children dancing and singing around her.

When he inquired, he learned that she had lost her entire family in an airstrike, along with her left leg.

Razan startled easily, even at the sound of a door slamming shut. When she spoke about the loud strike and the moments after waking up in the hospital, it was with detached clarity, as though recounting someone else's pain.

“The moment that really struck me,” Crickx reflects, “was when she began to cry and said, ‘I just want my leg back.’”

Since October 2023, nearly all of the estimated 1.2 million children in Gaza have been facing significant mental health challenges, with many showing signs of depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and regressive behaviours like bedwetting, according to recent reports.

Unaccompanied and separated children, many of whom are orphans, are especially vulnerable.

“Most of those children are being taken care of by their extended families —uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents,” says Crickx.

Amir (12) and Fatima Ashour (10) are two of them.

Having lost their parents and their five-year-old brother when their house was bombed by the Israeli forces almost a year ago, the siblings have been sheltering with their grandfathers in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.

“In everything I remember them, I am unable to forget them. I did not see them when they were martyred, I did not see them to say goodbye to them,” says Amir.

“The life of an orphan is very difficult,” their grandmother reflects. “When they see children with their mothers carrying them, you find them looking at them and sometimes you notice tears streaming down their cheeks.”

Collective and generational trauma is deeply embedded in Palestinian history, where an enduring spirit of resistance has long existed against the backdrop of the widespread experience of loss, most importantly, of one’s freedom.

By 2050, it is projected that one in every 142 Palestinians will have experienced the death of a parent, and one in 200 will have lost a child, according to the study.

“What they need is a ceasefire. It’s the only way they can start to rebuild and regain hope,” Crickx from UNICEF says.

Whatever the future holds, in Gaza, the collective memory of loss and grief is bound to linger long after the bombs fall silent.