Mentis Custos

I tell him, “Your dad is in heaven”. He says to me: “Then fly up there and bring him back.” At just seven years old, Kanan survived an Israeli missile strike on Palestine’s Gaza that killed his father, mother and four siblings while they were asleep. Pulled from beneath the rubble with severe injuries, the Palestinian child later had his arm amputated

A young girl waits in a food line in Gaza, visibly struggling in the mass of people as she holds an empty pot. Amid catastrophic levels of hunger and malnutrition, exacerbated by Israeli restrictions on aid and funding cuts by international organisations, most people in Gaza rely on charity kitchens for their daily meals.  Since the beginning of October, the distribution of daily hot meals and monthly food parcels to families has declined significantly due to funding shortfalls, with the UN World Food Programme’s cuts leaving around 500,000 people without monthly food assistance. About 1.4 million people — two-thirds of Gaza’s population — face crisis-level food insecurity or worse, while the WFP says it urgently needs $450 million over the next six months to sustain critical operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank ahead of a fourth winter as Israel continues its genocide of the Palestinian people

More than 20,000 children killed. 60,000 left without a mother, a father, or both. In Palestine’s Gaza, Israel’s genocidal war has stolen childhoods, shattered families, and left tens of thousands of orphaned children to face a future without the people who should have held their hands through it. Now as winter approaches, displacement and the dire conditions these children are forced to live in threaten even their chance to survive.