The Gaza war killed an estimated 20,000 children. CBS News meets several orphans, and “always afraid.”

Jerusalem Indirect peace talks between Israel and Hamas aimed at ending the war in Gaza and freeing the remaining Israeli hostages resumed on Wednesday in Egypt. President Trump’s envoy was Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner It is expected to arrive in Egypt on Wednesday to join the talks, a source familiar with the matter told CBS News.

The war was sparked by a terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, in which approximately 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage. Israeli officials believe that 48 of these people remain captive, although only 20 remain alive.

Since that day, the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza has said Israel’s retaliatory war has killed more than 67,000 Palestinians. Israel counts that number but provides no estimate of its own, and the United Nations considers the number the most reliable information available, as Israel has banned foreign journalists from working independently in Gaza.

Ricardo Beers, UNICEF’s spokesman for the UN, said this week that what he calls Israel’s “disproportionate response” in Gaza has killed or maimed at least 61,000 children since the war began.

A child dies every hour in Gaza — or “a classroom of children” per day, per day,” says UNICEF and global charity Save the Children, which cited data compiled by Hamas’s Gaza government media office. As developed by UNICEF.

Since the war started, Says the kids say At least 20,000 children were killed in total – nearly a third of all Palestinians believed to have died in the war.

UNICEF spokesman James Elder told CBS News that when he visited a besieged Gaza hospital this week, “the first thing I saw was four children all being shot by Quadcopters (military drones), and then I went into orbit and had children up against walls in all the hallways.”

“There was a boy bleeding on the floor who had been there for what seemed like five hours, and then he was put on a stretcher only to have another child put in his place,” Elder told CBS News. “Then I watched a little girl die. That’s half an hour here in Gaza.”

The staggering death toll does not reflect the thousands of children maimed and wounded, or those who lost one or both parents during the war.

At a makeshift camp for Palestinian orphans in the southern city of Khan Yunis, the CBS News Gaza team saw some young faces behind the grim statistics.

14-year-old Dina Al-Zarab, who lost her parents, said: “I hope the war is just a dream from which I wake up and see my parents next to me.”

She added, “I have to keep it together for my siblings, because now I have to raise them.”

Many of the children at the camp now spend their days doing adult work.

Arat Ajafaat, 10, promised her father that she would be a doctor before he died, but now she is focused on taking care of her younger sister.

“I just want to go back to how it was like that,” she told CBS News. “Whenever we heard the sound of missiles, my father used to hold us, but now he is gone, and we are always afraid.”

UNICEF says one in five children in Gaza suffer from acute malnutrition, and Elder emphasized that the trauma her youngest suffered was not physical.

“Not only have children lost loved ones, it’s not just about killing your mother, it’s about watching your mother die, and then you add that level of trauma to the displacement — and we talk about displacement, and it seems like a neutral or abstract term. It’s not. It’s violent. It’s repetitive, and it also heightens the trauma.”

The United Nations estimates that about 90% of Gaza’s population, some 1.9 million people, were forcibly displaced during the war, many of them multiple times as Israel’s military operations shifted. Recently, the Israel Defense Forces Everyone was ordered to leave Gaza Citythe largest population center in the enclave, moving to the south, to areas such as Khan Yunis.

It has led to another exodus, which aid workers say has increased suffering in the region and made it difficult to help those who show up, often with nothing.

“There have been several hundred thousand people who have moved from the north recently, in the last few weeks,” Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told CBS News’ Haley Ott on Wednesday.

“It was really crowded,” she said, speaking on the phone from central Gaza. “Now they are more than that. You can see a lot of people living on the side of the road, playing tents on both sides of the roads… There are a lot of people who fled on foot, and of course they couldn’t bring anything with them, and that creates very difficult conditions in terms of cleanliness and sanitation and those kinds of things.”

In the orphan camp — all of them included — 12-year-old Gazelle Bassam told CBS News she felt “this pain in my heart after I lost my father.”

“I want to live as I did before the war,” she said. “But I know that life will never be the same again.”

“I feel this pain in my heart after losing my father,” said 12-year-old Ghazal Bassam at the orphan camp. “I want to live as I did before the war, but I know that life will never be the same again.”

Agnes Rio and

tucker sr

He contributed to this report.