The event, Aug. 2 -- KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza - Saif Hijazi does not run anymore. Israeli shelling paralyzed the 13-year-old in January 2025, a year after the same war killed his father, Rami, in a strike on their home. On Friday, Saif sat in a wheelchair at the edge of a running track in Khan Younis while other children, many of them also orphaned by the genocide, raced in a marathon organized to force the world to look at what had happened to them.

more than 58,000 children in Gaza have lost one or both parents since October 2023, Al Jazeera reported. In a territory where the Gaza Health Ministry has counted more than 73,000 dead, this generation of orphans represents a crisis within the catastrophe, one that ceasefire negotiations have large...