As the number of WCNSFs – ‘wounded child, no surviving family’ – grows, charities struggle to find adults to look after them
W
ithin a few months, the war in Gaza had already made its own addition to the vocabulary of emergency medical assistance with the world’s most heartbreaking acronym: WCNSF, “wounded child, no surviving family”.
Over two years of bombardment and famine the problem has worsened, even though in the constant chaos created by Israeli bombing and evacuation orders, which fragment communities and scatter them around the Gaza Strip, it is hard to keep track of children separated from their families.
The UN’s child protection agency, Unicef, cited Gaza health ministry statistics from early September, recording 2,596 children who had lost both parents, and a further 53,724 who had lost either their father (47,804) or mother (5,920).
