ABC | Allyson Horn and ABC staff in Gaza | 6.12.23
Inside Gaza’s overwhelmed hospital system, an influx of injured children arriving alone without any family has prompted doctors to coin a new term: WCNSF.
The heartbreaking label stands for Wounded Child, No Surviving Family and means the child is the sole surviving member of their family.
Eleven-year-old Dareen was given the term when she was rushed to hospital alone and unconscious after an explosion where she was staying.
She says she was inside a house with about 50 members of her family when it was hit by an Israeli air strike.
“I was under the rubble, everywhere stones [were on my] head,” Dareen says.
“There was a man removing [people] from under the rubble. I started shouting … ‘I am here’.
“He said, ‘Dareen, try to remember if your Mum and Dad are inside or outside?’ I told him, ‘I don’t remember’.”
Dareen fell into a coma for three days before she regained consciousness.
Soon after waking, she was told her family had not survived.
“All of them were martyred … I miss them all.”
Gaza’s children orphaned by war
Dareen now writes letters to her deceased mother and father while sitting in her hospital bed.
One letter, with two love hearts drawn at the bottom of the page, reads “peace be upon you”.
She says she is the smartest girl in her class and has dreams of becoming a doctor.
But her future is uncertain. She, like many others, remain in Gazan hospitals under the care of hospital staff because there is nowhere else for them to go.
Nidaa Baroud, who is Dareen’s temporary carer, says the orphans have no alternative care options after the collapse of social services in the Palestinian enclave.
“I don’t know what [Dareen’s] fate will be,” Dr Baroud says.
“I wish her well because the girl has no-one left. She’s the lone survivor, no mother, no father.”
Dr Baroud has been following the little girl’s case since she was assigned to her care and says she treats Dareen like “one of my children”.
“We belong to the same country and we should help each other in such a crisis,” she said.
Doctors struggled to reunite families with communications limited
The number of children who have been orphaned in Gaza has yet to be calculated.
Without a functioning government, there are no official channels for orphans to access care outside of hospitals.
Before the collapse of Gaza’s biggest hospital, Al-Shifa, a senior doctor said at least 120 children at the facility had no surviving family.
Israel says nearly two dozen Israeli children lost both their mother and father in Hamas’s October 7 attack.
Staff inside the neo-natal ward at the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital in central Gaza care for some orphaned babies without knowing their names.
Khalil al-Degran says it has been impossible to identify them, so they are assigned a number.
“We would do our best, we would try to find survivors from their families to identify [them], but we would not find [anyone],” Dr al-Degran says.
“So we would register [them] as unidentified.”
Dr al-Degran says a lot of families have been “totally wiped out from the civil registry with the exception of one of the children”.
“Some of them were one year old or two or three [years old],” he said.
Communication blackouts and outages have restricted doctors’ abilities to search for distant relatives of orphaned children to organise adoption.
“There are no means of communication, whether by phone, or by mobile or by internet,” Dr al-Degran says.
Instead, adults in Gaza have been asked to go from hospital to hospital, to search for any children they know that need care.
A grandmother’s desperate search for her lost grandson
Sometimes turning up at a hospital and conducting a sweep has allowed families to reunite.
At Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital, a woman with a missing loved one searched frantically through several wards before she spotted a baby that looked like her grandson.
The child was just two weeks old and the rest of his immediate family was dead.
After some questioning, Dr al-Degran confirmed to the woman that the baby was her grandson. His name is Hassan.
She immediately broke down in tears upon finding her grandson, but the joyful reunion is mixed with pain.
“What’s the fault of this child to continue his life an orphan without a mother and without a father?” the grandmother cries.
“Now from the beginning of his life he’s been deprived of the simplest rights.
“My heart is broken over him.”