Wounded in a strike that killed her family, a 2-year-old joins Gaza's ranks of thousands of orphans

The 2-year-old toddler lay on a foil blanket, her face covered with salve for her burns and her little body riddled with scars from shrapnel. She squirmed, her breath heaving, as doctors examined her and the tube in her chest.

Siwar Abdel-Hadi is now an orphan. She’s the lone survivor of an Israeli strike that hit their family home in central Gaza, killing her parents, her two sisters and her brother, along with a brother of her mother.

“The whole family was gathered around a table for lunch” when the missile struck Tuesday in the Bureij refugee camp, said Nour Abdel-Hadi, one of Siwar’s paternal aunts. She spoke at nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where the overwhelmed staff rushed around her dealing with influxes of wounded.

Israel’s campaign of bombardment and offensives in Gaza has left thousands of orphans. Cases like Siwar’s have become so common, doctors created an acronym for it: WCNSF, “wounded child, no surviving family.” The United Nations estimated in February that some 17,000 children in the territory are now unaccompanied, and the number is likely to have grown since.