The Gaza Children’s Village was not created in a boardroom or during a strategic planning session. It was born in the hallways of Gaza’s collapsing hospitals, in the shadows of tents filled with families who had nowhere left to go, and in the hands of a surgeon who held children with no one left to claim them.
In December 2023, Dr. David Hasan crossed the Rafah border into Gaza during one of the most devastating periods the region had ever seen. He left behind a life of comfort, a career at Duke University, and his wife and seven-year-old daughter in North Carolina to serve where medical help had all but disappeared. He expected to operate. He expected suffering. But he was not prepared for the human stories that would alter the course of his life.
He wrote in his diary after one morning in the operating theatre: “Had to pronounce a toddler dead. No one was with him… I named him like he was my own son, Jacob. Then I held him and wept for him.”
He watched local nurses show up every day even when they did not know if their own families were still alive. He saw medical teams amputating children without sedation because no anesthesia remained. He saw mothers standing in destroyed streets begging for water. He saw thousands of displaced people sleeping in hospital hallways, whispering goodnight to one another because they did not know if morning would come.
The suffering became impossible to carry without doing more.
When he finally left Gaza, he wrote his “soul, spirit, and heart stayed behind.” In the weeks that followed, he could not let go of the faces he had seen. He realized something painfully simple: if help did not come fast, thousands of these children would face not only the trauma of war, but the trauma of growing up unseen.
And so, in April 2025, the Gaza Children’s Village was founded, not as an abstract organization, but as a promise born from a doctor’s witness.
ABOUT GCV
GCV is on the ground with trusted local teams, offering schooling, meals, and lifesaving pediatric care to children who cannot wait.
Our Mission
To provide Gaza’s children with safe, structured, daily environments where they can learn, heal, and grow with dignity, supported by consistent education, nutrition, medical care, and psychosocial programs.
Our Vision
Child protection, non-political humanitarian action, dignity, local leadership, transparency, and accountability.
What began with six hundred children soon expanded. In August, the Deir al Balah campus officially opened its full program. In October, the Khan Younis Academy of Hope opened and welcomed fifteen hundred children on its first day. Construction began soon afterward on the Zawaidah Academy, which will open by the end of the year and serve another fifteen hundred children.
Today the organisation provides daily care for more than two thousand one hundred children from the ages of four to fourteen. More than two hundred staff and volunteers support these programs. More than thirty teachers and counselors work across the academies. More than three thousand patients were treated in the clinics during September alone. Hundreds of thousands of meals have been served to children and nearby families.
Through every expansion, the organisation has remained community led. Local teachers, psychologists, social workers, and healthcare workers run the programs each day. Community leaders form oversight boards that ensure transparency and protect the projects from political influence. International partners provide expertise, training, and support without undermining local leadership.
The Gaza Children’s Village exists because one man refused to turn away from the suffering he witnessed. It continues because entire communities, both inside Gaza and around the world, believe that every child deserves more than survival. They deserve safety, dignity, nourishment, education, and the chance to dream again.
