‘We can’t tell her the truth’: Gaza’s hospitals filling with lone orphans

The number of children whose parents are both dead is mounting fast amid the Israeli bombardment.

When nine-year-old Razan Shabet was brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital one month ago, she was unconscious with a severe head injury, a brain haemorrhage and broken legs and arms.

For the first four days, she was listed as “101 Unknown”. Nobody knew who she was.

Today, the doctors and nurses at the hospital, where she remains housed in a tent in the compound, having been discharged from emergency medical treatment, still do not have the heart to tell her that both her parents are dead.

In the weeks since she first arrived at the hospital, medics have managed to work out that she and her family had been caught in an Israeli air strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp, where they had fled from their home in Tuffah, northern Gaza. Razan was the only survivor.

Ever since she woke up on day five, she has asked for her parents. “The most difficult question we receive is from a child asking you where their father or mother is, and they are already killed,” said Dr Ibrahim Mattar, an emergency doctor at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. “When she asked, I just kept silent and told the child that she should be okay.