3,000 Gaza Children Registered With No Guardian, Ministry Data Shows

The Palestinian Ministry of Social Development's registry shows about 3,000 children in Gaza with no registered guardian, custodian or caregiver, part of a count of 54,468 children who have lost one or both parents since October 2023. Across Gaza, the ministry counts at least 64,000 widows and 71,000 orphaned children, a figure that includes people bereaved in earlier Israeli military attacks on the territory.

Mariam Abu Asser, 16, her sister Aya, 14, and brother Jebril, 12, have moved between aunts' tents every two days since last year's ceasefire. Their father was killed during Israel's 2014 offensive on Gaza. Their Gaza City home was destroyed after the war began in 2023, and the three moved with their mother, Islam, into a makeshift tent in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. On 10 October 2025, the ceasefire took effect. Nineteen days later, an Israeli bomb struck the tent and killed Islam in front of her children. Jebril, who was sitting in his mother's lap, was injured.

The children stay mainly with their paternal grandmother and rotate among maternal aunts, spending two nights with each. Their aunt Warda al-Muzeini said the children have no stable home. "He saw his mother die in front of him," she said of Jebril. Muzeini lost her husband in an Israeli air strike and raises four children alone, without a job or reliable income. Another of the sisters is also a widow. The women split the cost between them, one buying pyjamas, another slippers, a third providing pocket money for a couple of days.

Ministry spokesperson Aziza al-Kahlout said a child who has lost both parents loses care, safety, education and childhood, and is pushed into responsibilities beyond their years. Women who become a family's sole breadwinners carry both providing and raising children, she said. Kahlout pointed to what she called "deeply alarming signs of growing risks of child labour, school dropout and early marriage in Gaza," driven by poverty, displacement and the loss of breadwinners.

Wafaa al-Attar, now 13, was 10 when she left home on 22 February 2024 to charge her father's phone at an uncle's house with solar panels. An air strike hit the multi-storey building in Deir al-Balah where her family lived, killing her father Ahmed, her mother Khouloud, and siblings Rital, 8, Muhammed, 5, Obada, 3, and nine-month-old Yazan. Attar suffered minor shrapnel injuries. She asked about her family until her uncle told her they had died. "All of them at once?" she said. She stayed first with grandparents, then moved in with her uncle, his wife and their newborn. "For months, I wished I had been with them in the house when it was bombed. I wished I had been killed with them," she said. Her uncle's wife told her that her father would want her to stay strong. "But of course, I know that no one could ever replace my own family," Attar said.