Nearly 21,000 children are missing in Gaza. And there’s no end to this nightmare | Arwa Mahdawi

Dead or dismembered Palestinians don’t seem to shock anyone any more. A couple of hundred killed over here, dozens burned to death over there, a bunch of children dead from malnutrition : every day there seems to be another massacre that barely makes a blip on public consciousness. After eight months of intense bombing, the most abject civilian suffering has been dangerously normalized.

Still, as steeled as people may have become to the horrors in Gaza, you’d have to be completely broken not to be devastated by Save the Children’s new report on the missing children of Gaza . While more than 15,000 children are estimated to have been killed by Israel’s relentless assault on the strip, Save the Children has estimated that up to 21,000 children are missing .

As Save the Children has said “it is nearly impossible to collect and verify information under the current conditions in Gaza”. But based on the extent of the bombing and the density and demographics of Gaza, the British aid group estimates that 5,160 children are presumed dead beneath the rubble.

Related: The starvation of Gaza is a perverse repudiation of Judaism’s values | John Oakes

“Others have been harmed beyond recognition by explosives, buried in unmarked or mass graves, or gone missing in the chaos of conflict,” the report says . “Many children have been detained and ‘disappeared’ by Israeli forces. Some thrown into unmarked graves … Others have been separated from their families and caregivers, at risk of exploitation.”

The numbers that have been coming out of Gaza have been almost too shocking to comprehend. Israel has killed more than 38,000 Palestinians. At least 86,477 Palestinians have been wounded. Every university in Gaza has been bombed . An Israeli bomb destroyed 4,000 embryos at a Gaza IVF centre . More than 10 children a day lose a limb. Twenty thousand children are missing.

It is impossible to defend these numbers and so, instead, apologists for what the international court of justice has found to be a “plausible” genocide have tried to discredit them. “Palestinians are lying!” has been a constant refrain from Israel’s cheerleaders since the start of this bombardment. They’re lying about how many people are dead. They’re lying about how many people are missing. They’re lying about how many kids are starving to death. In late October, for example, when 6,000 Palestinians had been killed, Joe Biden said he had “no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed … have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using”. Israel’s government’s spokesperson, meanwhile, has said Israel has been unfairly maligned “because of a fake and fabricated civilian death toll created and disseminated by Hamas”. Everyone is lying, basically, except Israel and the United States.

But, please, take a look at the parking lot that is now Gaza for a moment and ask yourself, in good faith, whether you really think these numbers are exaggerated? If anything, there’s a very plausible argument that the death count (which has been hovering around 38,000 for a while) has been underestimated.

It can’t be stressed enough that Israel’s assault on Gaza isn’t just war as usual: it’s been described as the most destructive bombing campaign of this century. Time and time again researchers and experts have said they have seen nothing like it . After just one month of bombing Israel had dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip, equivalent to two nuclear bombs , according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. Because of technological developments, explosives dropped on Gaza may be twice as powerful as a nuclear bomb.

By late April, Israel’s military had dropped 75,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza. A New York Times investigation in December found that American 2,000-lb bombs were responsible for some of the worst attacks on Palestinian civilians. Let me repeat that: those bombs weigh 2,000 pounds. When detonated they shred human bodies. Their blast radius can be as far as a quarter-mile away. Gaza is about the size of Las Vegas and one of the most densely populated areas in the world; almost half the population is under 18.

Think about the size of Gaza. Think about the scale of the bombing. Think about the traumatized foreign doctors who have come back from Gaza reporting they believe thatchildren have been directly targeted by Israeli troops . Do you really think that civilian casualties have been exaggerated?

Direct hits are only one part of the death toll, of course. There are also the buildings that collapse in the days and weeks after bomb blasts. Bear in mind that buildings in Gaza are often poorly built because of the 17-year-long Israeli-Egyptian blockade imposed on the strip. Israel doesn’t allow proper building supplies through its border crossing so many buildings are made from repurposed concrete which is low quality . That makes them even more liable to collapse.

And then there are the unexploded bombs hiding in the 37m tonnes of debris in Gaza; debris that could take more than a decade to remove . These will continue to kill and kill and kill.

The biggest killer, however, will probably be hunger. Human Rights Watch and Oxfam have both condemned Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war. According to the latest UN-partnered report on hunger levels in Gaza “96% of the population – some 2.15 million people – face acute food insecurity at ‘crisis’ level or higher”.

There is a lot of debate about whether the technical threshold for famine has officially been met, but a catastrophic (and entirely preventable) famine now seems inevitable. A report published on Tuesday by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which assesses global food insecurity, warned that almost all of Gaza will face famine within the next three months. Babies who don’t starve to death will face lifelong consequences from malnutrition .

You think Save the Children’s report that 21,000 children are missing in Gaza is horrifying? You think 15,000 dead kids is horrifying? Just wait. An entire generation’s future has been wiped out with US taxpayer money. Two UN agencies have said over 1 million people , half the population of Gaza, are “expected to face death and starvation by mid-July” if this war does not end. Very soon, 21,000 missing children will seem like nothing.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .