Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead

As of the end of July there were 18,457 children named on the long official list of Palestinian victims of Israel’s war in Gaza. Over almost two years, that is equivalent to bombs, bullets and shells killing a boy or girl every hour of every day.

In reality the deaths are not spaced out so evenly. Siblings, cousins and playmates are often killed together, by an airstrike or artillery shell. Even children shot by snipers or quadcopters are sometimes brought into hospitals in groups, doctors say.

Together they account for nearly one-third of all the war dead whose bodies have been collected and identified before burial.

The list of named victims maintained by health authorities in Gaza is recognised as authoritative by the international community, the UN and Israel’s military, although Israeli politicians frequently try to dismiss it.

But the strict rules that ensure its credibility also mean it cannot capture the full scale of tragedy inflicted on Gaza’s children and their families.

Missing from the toll are the thousands of victims still buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings as well as the war’s many indirect victims. Israel’s blockade has created deadly shortages of food, medicine, clean water and fuel.

Starvation has killed at least 150 children. The lack of clean water, basic drugs such as antibiotics and medical care for diseases including cancer have caused many more deaths, which health officials say they cannot attempt to count while fighting continues.

Many of the children who survived attacks have life-changing wounds. More than 40,000 children have been injured in the war, according to the UN. Gaza is now home to more child amputees than any other place in the world.

Rights groups, genocide scholars, international politicians and a UN commission have concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, citing evidence including mass killings of civilians.

The scale of child casualties dwarfs those from conflicts in Israel and occupied Palestinian territory and the broader region in recent decades.

In 2008 Israel’s Operation Cast Lead killed 345 children in Gaza over 22 days, statistics from the rights group B’tselem show. In 2014 Israeli attacks killed 548 children over 50 days of Operation Protective Edge.

In Iraq over the 15-year period that encompassed the rise and destruction of the Islamic State “caliphate”, between 2008 and 2022, the UN verified 3,119 child deaths in war.

“Overall, it is clear that children in Gaza are living through one of the most severe exposure situations we have documented in recent decades,” said Gudrun Østby, a professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), which tracks the global impact of wars.

All children in Gaza are exposed to “extreme conflict intensity”, a metric the PRIO defines as living less than 50km away from events where at least 1,000 people were killed by fighting in a single year.

The bloodiest period of Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011, offers some comparison. “[In Syria] each year from 2012 to 2015, more than half of all children lived in close proximity to extreme conflict events,” Østby said.

The Syrian Network for Human Rights documented more than 19,000 children killed in the first four years of the conflict. Syria’s population at the start of that war was about 10 times the population of Gaza in 2023.

Approximately one in every 50 children living in Gaza before the war have been killed by Israeli attacks, according to Save the Children.

Israel’s generals and soldiers are aware they are killing large numbers of children. The former head of military intelligence for much of the war said “it did not matter now” if children were among the dead.

Some politicians have argued that children are legitimate targets because they are used as human shields and the phrase “no innocents in Gaza” has become more commonplace in Israel.

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