Children Are Being Killed, Starved And Maimed In Gaza. As Doctors, We Will Not Be Silent.

We are Australian physicians, surgeons and psychiatrists. We are dedicated to the service of humanity and have pledged to care for our patients with justice, dignity, and without discrimination. We recognise the special vulnerability and innocence of children, and the unwavering obligation of all in positions of power to care for them.

We are legally and morally compelled to protect any child suspected to be at risk of harm or neglect, and to report concerns immediately. That duty does not end at our borders. We cannot remain silent while Palestinian children are being starved, maimed and killed by the actions of Israeli authorities and military forces.

What has been happening to the children of Gaza is indefensible. It demands that we speak and compels us to act.

The Scale of Killing

In June 2026, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry released its report, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed: Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian children in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since 7 October 2023.” The Commission found that Israeli authorities and security forces continue to commit genocide and war crimes by deliberately inflicting death and severe physical and mental harm on Palestinian children. It concluded that these acts form part of a deliberate strategy to destroy the future of Palestinians by targeting their children.

Chris Sidoti, an Australian expert in international human rights law and Commissioner on the inquiry stated that “every international legal norm has been violated by the actions of the Israeli authorities towards Palestinian children, and they need to be held accountable.”

Since 7 October 2023, the Commission reported that more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed and 44,000 injured. It described mass trauma, orphanhood, disability, repeated displacement, starvation, and the collapse of education and healthcare. It also detailed the destruction of health infrastructure on which children, newborns and pregnant women depend, finding that children have been killed both directly by military attacks and indirectly through the destruction of schools, hospitals and essential services. As UNICEF’s James Elder said, “These children were not killed in a war zone. They were killed in their homes. In their schools. While playing football. While fishing. They were shot, bombed and targeted by drones.”

These findings are consistent with converging public health evidence. A peer reviewed population survey published in The Lancet Global Health estimated 75,200 violent deaths in Gaza between 7 October 2023 and 5 January 2025. Women, children and older people comprised 56.2 per cent of those killed violently. Separate research published in The Lancet calculated more than 3 million life years lost, including more than 1 million life years among children under 15.

The Largest Cohort of Child Amputees in Modern History

As medical professionals, it sickens us to see our disciplines converge in ways they never should. The WHO estimates that around 43,000 people in Gaza have sustained life-changing injuries since October 2023, up to a quarter of them children. These are not statistics to us: they are major limb injuries, traumatic amputations, spinal cord injuries, burns and shattered skulls. Save the Children reported that, in the first three months of the war, more than ten children a day on average lost one or both legs, and UNICEF has documented over 1,000 children enduring amputations. Gaza now holds the highest rate of child amputees per capita anywhere on earth.

For these children, the injury is only the beginning. Several of our authors have worked in Gaza and witnessed this firsthand: wasted bodies cannot mount the metabolic response that healing demands. Wounds fail to close, surgical sites break down, and infection takes hold in patients with no physiological reserve to resist it. Malnutrition turns survivable injuries into fatal ones.

The WHO estimates that more than 50,000 conflict-related injuries in Gaza require long-term rehabilitation, yet rehabilitation services have been all but destroyed. Of 2,300 people with amputated limbs assessed between September 2024 and May 2026, fewer than a quarter had received permanent prosthetics. Between May 2024 and mid-April 2026, no rehabilitation equipment entered Gaza at all. Here too the world has failed them, unable to deliver even the most basic prostheses, orthoses or rehabilitative care.

Starvation as a Weapon

In August 2025, famine was officially confirmed in Gaza City. That month, UNICEF reported that 12,800 children across the Gaza Strip were identified as acutely malnourished, with one in five children screened in Gaza City diagnosed with acute malnutrition.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, known as the IPC, later reported some improvement after the October 2025 ceasefire but warned that conditions remained severe. Save the Children’s analysis of IPC data found that four out of five children in Gaza would enter 2026 still facing crisis levels of hunger. Through mid-October 2026, the IPC projects that nearly 101,000 children aged 6 to 59 months across Gaza will suffer acute malnutrition and require treatment, including more than 31,000 severe cases. A further 37,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are also expected to require treatment for acute malnutrition. UNICEF has reported that one in five babies in Gaza is being born prematurely or underweight.

For many children, even the search for food has become deadly. During humanitarian missions to Gaza in 2025, three of our authors treated multiple children who had been shot at aid distribution sites, many of whom succumbed to their injuries. One was nine-year-old Majed. A bullet fired by Israeli forces tore through his left arm, left lung and spleen. Despite the efforts of the surgical team, he bled to death on the operating table.

Starvation, when deliberately caused or sustained through the obstruction of humanitarian aid by state or military policy, is not a side effect of war. It is a weapon, and its primary victims are children.

The Trauma That Will Outlast the Bombs

The harm being inflicted on Gaza's children by Israeli authorities is not only written on their bodies. Armed conflict, forced displacement, bereavement, starvation and traumatic injury leave scars just as deep and far harder to see. Even before October 2023, Palestinian children exposed to political violence suffered high rates of post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety. What they are enduring now is of another order entirely.

Displaced children in Gaza are reported to have extraordinary levels of trauma exposure, PTSD symptoms and psychosocial distress, compounded by hunger, repeated displacement, the loss of home and schooling, and the injury or death of those they love. They are presenting with nightmares, insomnia, emotional dysregulation, social withdrawal, behavioural disturbance and a despair no child should ever know. UNICEF estimates that almost all of Gaza's 1.2 million children now require mental health and psychosocial support.

This is not distress that will simply resolve when the bombing ends. It is a mental health catastrophe unfolding alongside the physical destruction, and its consequences will include lifelong psychiatric morbidity, developmental disruption, complicated grief and intergenerational trauma.

We Would Never Accept This Here

We would not tolerate Australian newborns denied formula in their hospitals, our schools reduced to rubble, or our children left to die beneath it. We would not accept a single Australian child shot by soldiers, starved by blockade, orphaned by military assault, or torn apart by explosive weapons.

Yet this is what Palestinian children in Gaza are being forced to endure. The Commission reported that, even after the October 2025 ceasefire, Palestinian children have continued to be killed and seriously wounded by Israeli military forces. Since then, at least 265 children have been killed, an average of one child every day.

If these were Australian children, our nation would be united in grief and outrage, and we would demand protection, accountability and justice. We cannot value Palestinian children any less. Their lives are worth no less, their pain is no less real, and their right to safety, care, food, shelter and a future is no less absolute.

This is not only a matter of conscience; it is a matter of law. The Convention on the Rights of the Child guarantees every child's right to life (Article 6), to health and healthcare (Article 24), and to protection in armed conflict (Article 38). These obligations are not optional. They apply to every child, in every war, without exception.

We do not need future memorials to tell us what we know today. We need action now, to stop the killing, protect children and save lives while lives remain to be saved. History will remember where we stood. As doctors, and as human beings, we choose to stand with children, civilians and healthcare workers facing catastrophic harm. We call on every Australian, and every person of conscience, to do the same.

*References supporting the statements in this letter can be provided on request.

A/Professor Vikram Palit, FRACP (Paediatric Respiratory Physician)

Dr Stephen Parnis FACEM FAMA (Emergency Physician)

Professor Jon Jureidini, FRANZCP (Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist)

Dr Nadia Hasan, FRACP (General Paediatrician)

Dr Bushra Othman, FRACS (General Surgeon)

Dr Rasha Rahman, FRANZCP (Psychiatrist)

Dr Sanjay Adusumilli FRACS (Colorectal surgeon)

Dr Safiyyah Abbas, FRACP, FAFRM (Paediatric Rehabilitation Physician)

A/Professor Tarik Sammour, CSSANZ (Colorectal Surgeon)

Dr Ruth Mitchell FRACS FFSTEd FNNSA (Paediatric and Adult Neurosurgeon)

Dr Hemal Kodikara, FRACS (Paediatric General Surgeon)

A/Professor Alasdair Vance, FRANZCP (Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist)

Dr Geraldine M Dyer FRANZCP (Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist)

*****

Please add your details to join the signatory list.