Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.

Extract from Eureka Street

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• Vol 35 No 14
• Wounded Child, No Surviving Family

INTERNATIONAL

• Sandy Toussaint
• 17 July 2025                                  

 

In Gaza, an acronym is used by medical staff and aid workers: WCNSF, or ‘Wounded Child, No Surviving Family’. I was struck how those five words that should be unbearable, were compressed into five sterile letters. Even the unthinkable can be turned into bureaucratic shorthand.

For those entering field data under fire or counting the uncountable in a tented clinic with no electricity, this shorthand makes a kind of sense. When every second matters, you need language that moves fast. But for those of us far from Gaza, the use of this acronym demands pause. Not because it’s unfamiliar, but because it threatens to become familiar. It allows us to name the horror while at the same time distancing ourselves from it.

This naming-something-without-naming-it is common across the modern world, where acronyms increasingly pepper our lives: NATO, AI, WFH, LOL. Some carry strategic weight, others corporate pride or digital whimsy. A few, like WFH, nod to cultural shifts in how we live and work. Others have grown through the disturbing increase of tragedy, like Domestic and Family Violence (DFV) in the broader society and Criminal Law.

But rarely do we stop to consider what acronyms obscure, or who gets erased in the act of abbreviation. In some cases, the convenience of an acronym begins to suffocate the meaning it was meant to carry, and the very reasons for which they have come into being. Nowhere is this more apparent than in WCNSF — Wounded Child, No Surviving Family — that has emerged from the urgent need to acquire, count, and enter data about the thousands of children wounded and left without family in Gaza. 

Beyond the loss of life and the horrific images of wounded, dying and grieving people in Gaza that reach screens and newsprint around the world, there is the ongoing existence of children who not only survived bombing, thirst and famine, but who now live with the tragic and enduring loss of their loved ones.

That a need to shorten ‘Wounded Child No Surviving Family’ to WCNSF has arisen because of the nightmare for thousands of women, men and children in present-day Gaza tells us so much more than the acronym can ever convey, unless we take time to unpack it away from a counting tool only.

For medical workers operating under impossible conditions, such shorthand is necessary. Doctors, nurses, and aid workers are trying to manage dangerous conditions, morbidity, and mortality counts, and to save people’s lives with diminishing medical, internet and other resources.

 

'Spelling it out may seem like a small act, but it is one way to resist the quiet erasure of grief that should accompany such devastation.'

 

But for the rest of us, it’s worth asking what gets lost when five devastating words are reduced to five sterile letters. The philosopher Herbert Marcuse once warned against becoming ‘one-dimensional’; so fixated on efficiency that we lose our humanity and our ability to feel. Acronyms, coalesced from words and ideas to speed up communication, would likely have drawn Marcuse’s concern in their more widespread, uncritical use.

Compressing of horror into something more palatable has a long history. As Susan Sontag observed in Regarding the Pain of Others, language does not merely describe reality, but it also shapes our capacity to feel. When the unbearable is reduced to bureaucratic shorthand, the action goes beyond streamlining data and, intended or not, begins to dull moral perception. Similarly, French philosopher Simone Weil described attention as ‘the rarest and purest form of generosity’. According to Weil, giving one’s true attention is a moral posture. It requires us to suspend our habits of categorisation and truly behold the other.

Obviously, acronyms like WCNSF are vital for those on the ground in Gaza, and of course don’t intend to deceive, but they function in similar ways in shielding us from the visceral, and flattening grief into manageability. To look at a child labelled ‘WCNSF’ and still make the effort to imagine their life and their dignity is a form of attention that resists the indifference of bureaucratic systems. It does not change what happened, but it changes us and the ways we respond. And sometimes, that is where responsibility begins.

Many people watching the situation in Gaza feel limited in what they can do to support the people affected and help to diminish their suffering. Donations to aid organisations for water, food, and medicine help. So too, does making one’s feelings known through protesting, writing letters and emails, publishing, broadcasting, and advocating for sanctions (especially given legislation and international laws to protect the rights of the child are, disturbingly, not robust enough to protect children in Gaza).

Others turn to prayer.  But none of these efforts can be meaningfully undertaken if we allow ourselves to forget the names behind the numbers. The children of Gaza do not need our pity, they need food, water, medicine, justice. But they also deserve to be seen as more than a code. In contexts beyond triage, making room to spell it out: Wounded Child No Surviving Family may seem like a small act, but in moments like these, small acts matter.

They remind us that behind every abbreviation is a name we don’t know, a life cut short, a future we can’t imagine, and now, a child who must depend, against all odds, on others. Spelling it out may seem like a small act, but it is one way to resist the quiet erasure of grief that should accompany such devastation. It is a way to recognise the staggering loss of life in Gaza and the unbearable weight carried by its orphaned children.

To abbreviate that loss is to risk forgetting its scale and its human cost.

Wounded Child No Surviving Family. 

 

Sincere thanks to David Halliday for his considered, compassionate, and insightful editorial expertise from which this article has benefited.