In Gaza, more than 6,000 children with cerebral palsy are trapped in a nightmare of war, siege, and neglect, cut off from the care they need to survive. As the Israeli onslaught stretches into its 21st month, these children, among the most vulnerable in Palestinian society, are enduring what medical experts call a “slow death.”

With rehabilitation centres destroyed, hospitals overwhelmed, and medications vanishing from shelves, children who depend on routine therapy, assistive devices, and constant medical supervision have been left defenceless. Basic needs, like electricity to power oxygen machines or food soft enough to swallow, can no longer be met. Some children have died because their wheelchairs couldn’t be charged to evacuate them during attacks.

“There is no treatment, no shelter, no food, and no safe space for these children,” says Mustafa Abed, director of the Community-Based Rehabilitation Program at the Palestinian Medical Relief Society. “They are being erased in silence.”

Most centres once dedicated to caring for children with disabilities, public and private, have shut down completely. Staff have been killed, displaced, or left without pay. The few that remain are overwhelmed and unable to reach the areas most affected by bombardment.

This is not simply a healthcare collapse, it is a deliberate stripping of human dignity. Children with cerebral palsy, who already face enormous physical and sensory challenges, are being left behind in a system collapsing by design. Their pain, invisible to much of the world, is one of the war’s cruelest betrayals.

Unless there is urgent international intervention, these children will continue to die, not in a single blast, but in quiet, preventable suffering.