GAZA, (PIC)
The Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared launched a wide campaign of correspondence targeting members of the European Parliament and international human rights organizations, on the occasion of International Missing Children’s Day (May 25), to inform them about the issue of missing children in Gaza. The campaign included detailed documents outlining their numbers and the circumstances of their disappearance.
In a statement on Monday, the Center explained that the campaign aims to raise awareness of this issue, visible on the ground but absent from international platforms, and to urge international actors and parliamentarians to bring it up in European Parliament sessions, pressing Israeli authorities to reveal the fate of children hidden in its prisons and detention centers.
The Center highlighted the ongoing tragedy of around 2,900 children in Gaza who are missing or forcibly disappeared. Estimates suggest about 2,700 children remain trapped under the rubble of destroyed buildings, unreached due to severe shortages of equipment, restrictions on fuel entry, and attacks on rescue teams, as well as the presence of Israeli forces in those areas. This is part of a wider total of about 7,000 missing persons in the Strip, while statistics record 21,510 children killed during months of continuous assault.
Among the total, contact has been lost with about 200 children in different areas of Gaza, amid fears and indications of enforced disappearance by the Israeli army, or direct targeting that left their bodies unrecovered on the streets.
Researchers at the Center documented cases of children being taken by Israeli forces, followed by enforced disappearance without disclosure of their fate or detention locations, particularly near aid distribution points and areas under Israeli military control.
Documentation shows that many missing children had gone to humanitarian aid distribution points or attempted to obtain flour from high-risk areas during extreme hunger, while others disappeared while collecting firewood or returning to their destroyed homes to salvage belongings. This reflects the daily dangers they face in an environment lacking basic safety.
The Center stressed that leaving thousands of children’s bodies under rubble is a compounded violation of human dignity, intensifying the psychological suffering of families trapped between despair and hope. It warned that failure to take serious international measures to recover bodies and determine the fate of the missing entrenches impunity and deepens the humanitarian wound.
In its campaign, the Center called for urgent and effective international action to end this tragedy, including European Parliament members using their tools to raise the issue of Gaza’s missing and disappeared children in plenary sessions, and submitting written and oral parliamentary questions to the European Commission to ensure EU pressure and accountability.
It also demanded binding legal mechanisms to compel Israeli authorities to immediately disclose the names and fate of detained children, their health conditions, and to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross immediate access to them. Simultaneously, it urged international intervention to guarantee entry of heavy equipment and fuel needed for civil defense teams to recover children trapped under rubble, an inherent humanitarian right ensuring victims’ dignity and families’ right to know their fate.
The statement concluded by affirming that protecting children in times of armed conflict is a legal and moral obligation under international humanitarian law and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and that continuing to target them or expose them to death, disappearance, and enforced disappearance constitutes a crime that does not lapse with time.