Israel and Egypt agreed to allow at least 19 sick children, most of them cancer patients, to leave Gaza for medical treatment on Thursday, Israeli and Palestinian officials said, in the first major evacuation of critically ill Gazans since the Rafah border crossing shut down in early May.

Israel’s forced starvation has caused the deaths of two more children in central Gaza where conditions have been made worse by Israel’s closure of the Rafah crossing, further limiting aid and trapping sick and injured Palestinians.

The UN's top court has ordered Israel to enable the unhindered flow of aid into Gaza in order to avert a famine.

An aid official who travelled the length of Gaza this week has described scenes of “utter annihilation”, with “nothing left” of what were once thriving and crowded cities in the territory. “The depth of the horror surpasses our ability to describe it,” said James Elder, a spokesperson with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

At least 17,000 children in the Gaza Strip have been left unaccompanied or separated from their families nearly four months into Israel’s assault on the enclave, the United Nations children’s agency estimates.

Born amid the horrors of the war in Gaza, the month-old baby girl lying in an incubator has never known a parent's embrace. She was delivered by Caesarean section after her mother, Hanna, was crushed in an Israeli air strike. Hanna did not live to name her daughter.

The war in Gaza has already let to an unprecedented loss of life, but there's also growing concern about the destruction of public and private buildings. Now a senior UN official has told BBC News of his fears that the widespread damage will lead to a "lost generation" of young people.

The U.N. human rights chief on Friday called for an investigation into what he called Israel's use of "high-impact explosive weapons" in Gaza, which he said was causing indiscriminate destruction in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The death of 10-year-old Fatima Furiro would have passed sadly but quietly had it not been for the two graphic videos that turned up on social media. The little girl’s body was this week exhumed for a postmortem examination, days after the videos mysteriously appeared online.

This article from BBC News shares the story of one family from Pakistan who came to the UK to seek medical treatment for one of their children, leaving their eldest son behind with his grandmother in Pakistan. The grandmother later became ill and placed the boy in an orphanage where he is now "stuck" due to the COVID-19 pandemic.