Despite the International Court of Justice’s interim measures order issued on 26 January 2024, Israel has persisted in a more than four-month campaign in Gaza, killing at least 30,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, and injuring 66,630 others, as of 4 February 2024. Thousands of children are estimated to be alone in Gaza and the authorities have inaugurated an acronym: WCNSF: wounded child, no surviving family. Simultaneously, between 7 October 2023 and 4 February 2024, IOF and Israeli settlers killed 373 Palestinians, including 95 children and three women, in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Military operations, the shelling of refugee camps in Jenin (West Bank), with dozens of civilians killed and more than 6,000 displaced in July 2023 alone, along with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and bombings in Lebanon and Syria, have led to an all-out Israeli offensive outside Gaza’s borders, with the consequent risk of regional contagion.
In the last 16 years, the Gaza Strip has suffered up to 5 major offensives with thousands of people killed and civilian infrastructure damaged causing an ongoing crisis under Israeli siege and blockade, increasing high levels of severe poverty (63% food insecurity), climate, electricity and water supply crisis (97% of water is contaminated) and chronic intergenerational trauma to children (95% of children in Gaza show symptoms of anxiety, depression and trauma) and adults in the Gaza Strip.11