At the end of February, standing at the entrance to a shopping mall in the United Arab Emirates, Bisan Alkolak's little sister started screaming. "Is this an airport? I don't want to travel!" repeated the two-and-a-half-year-old. Her mother calmly asked her why. The little girl continued to scream: "I don't want to go to Gaza. Gaza is full of blood. There are bombs." The family had been evacuated from the Palestinian enclave a week earlier, after four months under bombardment. "Our trauma is immense," 20-year-old Bisan said on the phone, describing the scene to Le Monde.

Her little sister has good reason to be terrified. Around 40% of the more than 33,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, have been children. In six months, Israeli bombs devastating the small, besieged territory, as well as combat, army sniper fire and now looming famine have killed more children than four years of conflict anywhere else in the world, reported UNRWA, the UN agency in charge of Palestinian refugees, which has been at the forefront of the humanitarian response in Gaza for months. "Every day, 10 children lose their legs," wrote its Commissioner General, Philippe Lazzarini, on X on April 1.

"The scale of the psychological impact on these children is unprecedented: Some have seen soldiers come into their homes and kill their parents before their very eyes, others have witnessed their homes being bombed. They lived in freezing cold and starvation, and many spent days alone in the streets," said Caitlin Procter, a researcher at the Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding in Geneva, who has conducted research on young people in the small Palestinian territory. "The situation means that even children's mental health experts in Gaza feel completely overwhelmed and are themselves in need of help."

In Rafah in the very south of the Palestinian enclave, where almost 1.3 million displaced Gazans live, "children are everywhere in the streets," said Karyn Beattie, team leader of the NGO Save the Children in Gaza. Some, not yet teenagers, are already breadwinners. They carry liters of water or sell on the street some of the food aid they have received, often to buy other basic necessities.

All of them need psychological support after being traumatized by the shooting and bombing. In Gaza, children "know that other children have been killed and wounded, and they know that they're not safe anywhere," said Beattie, whom Le Monde spoke to by phone – Israel prohibits foreign journalists from entering Gaza.

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