Palestinian parents take heartbreaking step of writing their children’s names on legs to ID them if killed

Some Palestinian parents have taken the heartbreaking step of writing their children’s names on their legs so the kids can be easily ID’d if killed, a report said Sunday — as the death toll in Gaza rose to 4,741.

More than 265 people were killed within a recent 24-hour period alone in Gaza, including 117 children, said the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which is controlled by Hamas, on Sunday.

In all, a reported 1,873 children have been slain in the region since Israel began its onslaught of air raids on the densely populated disputed territory after a coordinated Hamas terror attack killed more than 1,400 Israelis on Oct 7., the ministry said.

As the crisis in the war-torn region continues to escalate, an increasing number of Gaza parents have taken to writing the names of their children on their young ones’ lower legs to identify them if they are killed, CNN reported Sunday.

A toddler and three children who had been killed in airstrikes overnight and taken to a full morgue at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in central Gaza had their names written in Arabic on their calves, footage from the network showed.

The desperate practice of writing children’s names on their bodies has been increasingly common as Gaza hospitals become overwhelmed by the influx of patients and bodies, according to the report.

Gaza health officials also warned that the war has worsened access to hospitals in the densely populated strip.

The territory’s main hospital, Al-Shifa, said Sunday that it has been forced to scale back dialysis sessions for hundreds of kidney patients, while warning that electricity and fuel shortages caused by an Israeli blockade “will lead to a major humanitarian catastrophe, especially for patients with kidney failure.”

The development came even after a 20-truck convoy brought life-saving medical supplies and some food into the narrow 28-mile-long territory by way of Egypt on Saturday — the first time humanitarian aid was allowed into the region since the conflict erupted.

About 1.4 million people, or 60% of Gaza’s population, has been displaced as Israel continues to unleash its air strikes on Hamas targets, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated Friday. About 15,898 had been wounded in the attacks, Gaza’s health ministry said.

In the West Bank northeast of the Gaza strip, more than 90 Palestinians had been killed over the past two weeks as Israeli troops target terrorists there.

Six Palestinians were killed in two different attacks Sunday, two of them dying in an airstrike on a Jenin refugee camp mosque that Israel said was connected to terrorists.

Israel has rarely deployed air attacks in the territory even as it launched continuous blitzes on Gaza. The escalating violence in the West Bank threatened to open another front to the two-week old war. The territory controlled by Israel and is partly administered by the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority.

About 700 suspects had been detained in the West Bank since war broke out, including 480 members of Hamas, according to Israel.

–With Post Wires