Gaza has the highest number of child amputees in modern history
Gaza: The World’s Largest Tragedy of Child Amputees - A Living Genocide
Gaza is living through what legal experts and many activists, including myself, call a genocide - a systematic campaign of destruction that spares nothing, not even children.
Today, Gaza holds an unbearable distinction - it has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world, and the largest cohort of amputee children in modern history. This is the direct result of Israel’s siege and bombardment, which have turned Gaza into the world’s largest open-air prison and a graveyard of childhoods.
Since October 2023, the violence imposed on Gaza has been relentless. Reports show that an average of ten Palestinian children lose a limb every single day. “Children are waking up to a reality of blood and loss,” a Gaza-based doctor told Humanity Inclusion in 2024. “Their limbs are not casualties of war - they are casualties of an orchestrated campaign of destruction.”
Today, official figures suggest that between 3,000 and 4,000 children in Gaza live with permanent amputations - this number will rise much higher once the blockade is brought to an end, and international observers are granted entry. But even the official numbers are a living testament to the brutality of this ongoing genocide.
Again, an underestimation, but officially, over 123,000 Palestinians have been injured since the genocide took grip, and more than 6,000 prosthetic limbs are desperately needed. Yet these needs go unmet due to Israel’s deliberate siege, which has cut Gaza off from essential medical supplies.
Hospitals lie in ruins, their corridors echoing with the sounds of pain and desperation. Medical teams work without basic equipment, improvising in impossible conditions. “We have no anesthesia. We have no sterile equipment. We have no way of giving these children the care they deserve,” said Dr. Ahmad Al-Shawa, an orthopedic surgeon working in Gaza City. “Every amputation is a tragedy. Every child is a victim of a deliberate policy.”
Children endure makeshift amputations without adequate pain relief. Every day brings more trauma, more mutilation, and more irreversible loss. This is not collateral damage - it is the calculated destruction of a people, of a generation.
International organisations such as UNICEF have stepped in to provide some relief, distributing hundreds of wheelchairs to children. A UNICEF representative said, “We are doing everything possible to reach children who have suffered life-changing injuries. But the scale of the crisis is staggering. We cannot meet this need alone.”
Startups like Pakistan’s Bioniks have joined efforts to help, using innovative technologies like 3D printing to deliver affordable prosthetic limbs to children injured in the war. Yet, as one Gaza mother told Reuters, “A prosthetic can help a child walk again, but it cannot heal the loss of their childhood, their dreams, their innocence.”
This is a crisis born of occupation, blockade, and systematic violence. Gaza is not enduring a war - it is enduring genocide. The children of Gaza are its most vulnerable victims. They grow up in a landscape of rubble, under the shadow of amputations, and with futures stolen before they even begin.
The world cannot look away. This is not a tragedy in the abstract - these are real children, real victims, a real genocide. Justice demands action - an end to the siege, an end to the occupation, and the recognition of the Palestinian people’s right to life, dignity, and freedom.
A UNICEF report in early 2025 warned, “Without urgent intervention, the physical and psychological scars of Gaza’s children will last generations.” Gaza’s amputee children are living proof of a crime against humanity. To ignore them is to stand against humanity itself.