The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
What label do you put on a child with no future?
Categorising patients in any medical emergency is vital, but ‘WCNSF’ is one of the saddest being used
Early in the morning on Oct 8, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombed the home of nine-yearold Joud Younis in central Gaza. The blast, part of a retaliatory barrage in response to Hamas’ devastating Oct 7 attack, threw the young girl out of her bed and onto the street.
It was only when the doctors treating her at a nearby hospital tried to reach her family that they realised they could not: her mother, father and five siblings had all been killed in the strike.
Joud became what is now known in Gazan hospitals as a “WCNSF”, a wounded child with no surviving family. The chilling acronym, highlighted in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel underway in The Hague, reflects extraordinary toll of the war on Gazan children.
Unicef estimates children make up 40 per cent of the 24,000 people who have been killed in the war according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.
The Israeli government says it has taken great care to avoid civilian casualties, urging residents to evacuate areas ahead of airstrikes.
When interviewed by
in the home of her aunt in the southern city of Rafah, Joud would not speak about the airstrike that killed her family three months ago.
Dania Bardawil, Joud’s aunt, took the girl in after being contacted by the hospital treating her in the city of Nuseirat. Movement across the Gaza Strip was easier then, as Israel had yet to launch its ground invasion.
Today Joud shows no sign of the shrapnel wound she received in her leg and has recovered enough to play on swings and slides in the neighbourhood. “She was sleeping next to the window and was thrown out of the house by the blast wave while she was sleeping,” Ms Bardawil said. “I’m trying to make up for what happened to her, and I’m also trying to keep her life as it was in the past,” she said, as Joud sat stony-faced on a sofa nearby.
The girl brightened when her uncle took her outside, rushing to a slide in the yard that is now too small for her or her three cousins to quite fit down.
On the way back home from a playground, she and her uncle stopped by a building destroyed by a recent air strike. The sight reminded her of her own home, Joud said.
This week, Dr Aldo Rodriguez, a surgeon with Doctors Without Borders, discussed the emergence of the WCNSF acronym in testimony released by the NGO. “Some of my most trying moments in Gaza were during the 20 to 25 surgeries I performed each day,” he said.
“Due to the high number of children arriving without any family members, we began to use the acronym.”
Dr Imad Al-Hams, who sees patients with light injuries at a tent on the grounds of the Al Kuwait Hospital in Rafah, said WCNSF was now a widely recognised term.
“This is the acronym that we use and have encountered a lot in recent times,” he said. “This is the first war in which we have witnessed such ferocity and atrocity: We have many cases who came here and they lost their entire family.”
Women and children are believed to make up around 70 per cent of the death toll in Gaza, according to the
UN, with an estimated 25,000 children losing one or both of their parents, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. About 1,000 children in Gaza have lost one of both legs, with some having to undergo amputations without anaesthetic, according to multiple reports and Doctors Without Borders.
“For nearly 100 days, children have been paying the price for a conflict they have no part in,” Jason Lee, Save the Children’s director for the occupied Palestinian territories, said this week. “One per cent of the child population of Gaza has already been killed by Israeli bombardments and ground operations. For children who have survived, the mental harm inflicted and the utter devastation of infrastructure including homes, schools and hospitals has decimated their future.”
The exact number of children who lost their entire families in the war is unknown although aid organisations have been working to gather data on orphans, unaccompanied and separated children. Unicef has asked Gaza’s hospitals to contact the International Committee of the Red Cross in order to reunite children with extended family members. Those who have lost their entire families are typically picked up by distant relatives, who may themselves be struggling to make ends meet during a conflict that has left hundreds of ‘For nearly 100 days, children have been paying the price for a conflict in which they have no part’ thousands without enough food.
Dr Rodriguez from Doctors Without Borders, who spent three weeks at a Gazan hospital last year, says many of the children he operated on were allowed to stay on the hospital grounds in a sort of limbo.
“Every day, I saw these children alone and devastated,” he said.
“It’s a dramatic situation because it’s not just surgery. It’s everything that comes after that. Even if they are discharged, they hang around because they don’t know what to do and have nowhere to go. They may get better physically, but mentally they are destroyed.”