(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



The most dangerous place in the world to be a child [1]

[]

Date: 2025-02

Alert is a biannual magazine published by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF-USA) that features ground reporting from our work around the world. This article appears in the Summer 2024 issue (Vol. 25, no. 1), Connecting Threads: Displacement, Conflict, and the Human Stories That Link Us

Content warning: This article includes graphic descriptions of violence.

The current war in Gaza has upended the lives of more than 1 million Palestinian children, who represent a significant percentage of the more than 36,000 killed, 80,000 injured, and 1.9 million people displaced under intense, ongoing Israeli bombardment and siege.

As Israeli forces’ operations have intensified in the south of the Strip, where the majority of the population had sought refuge, children are being uprooted yet again as families flee attacks on Rafah. But this reality is all too familiar in Gaza, where many children have never known life with sustained peace or free access to basic needs like food, water, and electricity. By the time the current war started last year, a 10-year-old in Gaza had already lived through four military assaults.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been caring for Palestinian children since 1989, and we continue to work in Gaza and the West Bank. Even before the current war started in October 2023—when the militant group Hamas launched an attack on various sites in Israel, leaving about 1,200 people dead and taking more than 200 hostage—many years of instability had already taken a toll on the physical and mental health of Gaza’s children, leaving many with life-changing injuries, amputated limbs, and the trauma of losing parents and other loved ones along with their homes and schools. Any one of these experiences on its own is traumatic. Compounded, they have resulted in a massive and spiraling crisis.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/most-dangerous-place-world-be-child

Published and (C) by Common Dreams
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/commondreams/