For the second year, the world scrolls through their phones watching reels of dismembered and dead children wrapped in white shrouds in the Gaza-Israel war. The muezzin’s call echoes through the ruins, a wail, as if searching to see if anyone was alive.
Some watch with outrage, others with resignation. The question remains: how many lives can be taken in the name of self-defence?
Children who should be growing up free and safe are instead trapped in a nightmare - in the rubbles - both of which they did not create.
Slowly, the war has become an uncomfortable reality, ceasefires come and go, but the war refuses to be resolved.
The International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression is a reminder. Of the harrowing images of children scrambling over one another for a morsel - and even that is not the worst. Of Palestinian Ambassador to the UN breaking down at Security Council sessions. "How can anyone tolerate this horror?" Riyad Mansour bewailed.
The worst is when children are killed: needless to say, innocent children, and with only the faintest idea of what war even means.
Gaza, a tiny strip of land hemmed in by the Mediterranean Sea and a relentless military force, remains trapped - bombed, starved and cut off from aid. The price is paid by those who continue to bury their dead as their homeland shrinks.
Sanctions are imposed. Speeches are given. But children still die. As many as 50,000 children have reportedly been killed or injured since October 2023, as per a report released on 27 May by UNICEF. All that is left behind is remnants of lives - their shoes, their books, their questions.
In 해외카지노 Magazine’s 11 January 2024 issue, ‘We Bear Witness’, we reached out to ordinary people who have been posting about their daily lives on social media from Gaza and refugee camps.
One of these was Salma and her father. On the 44th day of the Palestinian Holocaust, Salma’s father asked her, “Should we leave our country to Zionists? Should we go to a safe country that’s not ours?”
“I want to stay in Palestine, Baba,” she said.
“What about the bombing?”
“We can stay. We have the resistance.”
An Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin declared just last month, "Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas, nor is it the military wing of Hamas. We need to conquer Gaza and colonise it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory."
Every word of the statement is appalling — it threatens sovereignty, glorifies colonization. Above all, it dehumanizes children.
In the face of unprecedented violence, will malnourished children - enduring both war and famine, attacked day and night - choose to fight or flee as bombs land just meters away?
Ghia Haddad ‘The Olive Tree’: Poem In Honour Of Palestinian Children And Hope, wrote on pictures in the sky, pockets of air in barbed wire, and the borders on this earth that are drawn and redrawn by pre-colonials, colonials, and post-colonials.
“Our Earth will always grow Palestinian trees, Palestinian children, and Palestinian hope.”
A Gaza doctor, Chris Hook, spoke to us of the horrors inside collapsing hospitals.
“We had to step over the bodies of dead and dying children to save the ones with a chance.”
This is all in the name of self defence.
In another 해외카지노 Magazine’s 11 December 2023 issue, ‘trapped’, Brahma Prakash mentioned ‘Resistance Of Lullaby’.
Maternal lullabies shared between mothers, grandmothers and children, the sound of lullaby which is deep as it endures on the landscape; it refuses to die even in death
“If Palestine is the body, Gaza is the eyes—the sparkling eyes of the children.”
It could be folly to hope against hope. As protestors turn Paris’ fountains red in defiance of the “self-defence”, we hope for Motasem Dalloul to fill in the blank page that was carried in 해외카지노 Magazine’s 11 January 2025 issue ‘War and Peace’.
“I lost my wife, two sons, sister, brother and 43 nieces and nephews, in addition to 13 cousins.
Today morning, I lost my elderly uncle Akram and four of his siblings in the Israeli bombing of his house, where 20 family members were wounded..”
For now, all we have is this testimony.
