Since the Israel-Hamas war began, Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed at a rate of more than one every hour, the Washington Post reports. The Post has published a list of the names and ages of around 18,500 children killed in the war. Some 953 of them died before they reached their first birthday. The list was released in mid-July by the Gaza Health Ministry. On Tuesday, the ministry said the death toll had risen above 60,000, including 18,592 children and 9,782 women, reports the AP. "Consider that for a moment. A whole classroom of children killed, every day for nearly two years," UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said earlier this month.
The ministry, part of the Hamas-run government, is staffed by medical professionals and the United Nations considers its count reliable. Israel has disputed the figures, arguing that numbers were exaggerated, though a study published in the Lancet found that the ministry's statistics were likely an undercount. The ministry relies on records from hospitals and morgues, along with reports from victims' families. Economics professor Michael Spagat, chair of the Every Casualty Counts charity, tells the Post that the ministry is doing "unusually high-quality real-time casualty recording" and is "trying to be really careful and rigorous." In recent weeks, child deaths from malnutrition have been rising in Gaza.
The Post also published the stories behind a few of the names, including 5-year-old Tariq Abu al-Shaer: "Tariq, unlike many children, would ask his mother to help him get ready quickly so he could hurry to school. He owned a bicycle and dreamed of becoming a pediatrician." Tariq, his 8-year-old brother Abdul, and his brother Sannd, 70 days old, were killed in an airstrike last September.
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