Israeli forces massacred a total of over 800 babies under one year old in the genocide, Gaza officials said.
Israeli forces murdered hundreds of babies who were born during their genocide in Gaza, Palestinian officials say — babies who were born into a world of death and who died knowing only Israeli bombardment and siege.
The Gaza Government Media Office said on Tuesday that Israeli forces killed 214 babies born after October 7, 2023, in their genocide. Since that date, Israeli forces have killed more than 800 babies under one year of age, and over 17,800 children in Gaza overall, officials said.
These numbers include Aser and Aysal Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan, twins killed in an Israeli airstrike in August. They were killed along with their mother and grandmother as their father went to register their births, only to come back to find his family slaughtered.
The babies were just four days old.
It’s likely that far more newborns were killed than have been registered. Civil defense workers have spent the first days of the ceasefire agreement searching for the bodies of Palestinians buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel, and have reported finding the bodies of at least 200 people so far.
There are an estimated 10,000 Palestinians still missing under the rubble, while thousands of bodies were disintegrated and/or vaporized by Israeli blasts, officials have said. Children’s bodies are especially susceptible to being torn apart and rendered unrecognizable from airstrikes or other methods of Israeli attacks.
Palestinian children have suffered in myriad other ways due to the genocide, as Gaza’s government office noted. According to officials, 38,500 children lost one or both parents during the genocide, while at least 3,500 children are at imminent risk of death due to starvation and malnutrition.
The Government Media Office also released a tranche of other statistics on the genocide. According to officials, the Israeli military killed 2,092 entire families, and 4,500 people had to have limbs amputated due to Israeli attacks, 18 percent of those children.
Health officials have also documented over 2.1 million cases of infectious diseases due to displacement and lackof medicine.
The statistics are a grim show of the totality of Israel’s destruction, leaving no aspect of life untouched. Palestinians returning to their former homes after months of genocide have found nothing but rubble and debris, with infrastructure like running water or displacement shelters all destroyed by Israel.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Israeli forces destroyed 92 percent of homes across Gaza in the genocide, and satellite imagery from the UN shows that nearly 70 percent of all structures were destroyed or damaged as of December.
Nothing was spared from Israeli bombardment. On Wednesday, the Gaza Education Ministry said that Israeli bombardment damaged 95 percent of schools in Gaza and rendered 85 percent of them unusable. Children were unable to attend school during the genocide, already setting an entire generation’s education back by two school years, and at least 800 people who worked in education were killed amid the genocide, the government said.
Israel’s ban on the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) may set children back even further. UNRWA provided schooling for roughly 300,000 children in the Gaza Strip before the genocide, but will be banned from the territory by Israel starting January 28 if international powers don’t intervene.