[News] The Unbelievable Stories About the Children of Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/05/the-unbelievable-stories-about-the-children-of-gaza/>
The Unbelievable Stories About the Children of Gaza
Vijay Prashad
July 5, 2024
------------------------------

Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

The story should not be real. It was the morning of January 29, 2004. The
Israeli military had already bombed substantial parts of the affluent Tel
al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City, including—in October 2023—the totality
of the Gaza City campus of the Islamic University of Gaza. Following a
warning from the Israeli military, seven members of a family got into a Kia
Picanto to flee southward. But the Israeli bombing had leveled a nearby
high-rise, so the car had to go north before it could go south.

Not far down the road, the car came under fire from Israeli military
vehicles, including Merkava tanks. According to a remarkable investigation
<https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-hind-rajab> by
UK-based research agency Forensic Architecture, 355 bullets were fired into
the car.

One of those in the car, a six-year-old child named Hind Rajab, called
emergency workers. “They are dead,” she says
<https://x.com/PalestineRCS/status/1759285054369304869> of her family
members. “The tank is next to me. It’s almost night. I am scared. Come get
me, please.” The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) sent an ambulance to
rescue her.

Two weeks later, on February 10, Hind Rajab’s dead body was found near the
bodies of her family, along with those of the paramedics (Ahmed al-Madhoun
and Yusuf al-Zeino) sent to save her. “The tank is next to me,” says the
young girl on a tape saved by the PRCS, but both the U.S. State Department
and the Israeli military say
<https://www.state.gov/?post_type=state_briefing&%3Bp=92333> that no tanks
operated in the area at that time. It is the word of a murdered child
against the world’s most dangerous and disingenuous governments.

The murder of Hind Rajab and her family shocked the world (Hind Rajab’s
father was killed <https://x.com/jeremyscahill/status/1807868423092789298> in
a separate attack in late June). When the students at Columbia University
occupied their administration building, they named it Hind Rajab Hall; the
singer Macklemore released a song
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgDQyFeBBIo&rco=1> in May called “Hind’s
Hall.”

*Everyday Violence*

June 14: One child was killed <https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/145043> by
Israeli airstrikes in Zeitoun (Gaza City).

June 22: Two children were killed
<https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/145200> by Israeli airstrikes in
Shujaiya (Gaza City).

June 25: Two children were killed
<https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/145278> by Israeli fire on al-Wahda
Street, near Al-Shifa Hospital (Gaza City).

June 25: Three children were killed
<https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/145271> by Israeli airstrikes in the
Maghazi refugee camp.

Each of these stories is about precious children, most of whom have not
even reached the age of 10. Some of these children lived through the
barbarous Israeli bombardment of 2014 when over 3,000 children had been
killed. Sitting in the homes of families in Gaza City and Khan Younis in
the aftermath of that war, I heard story after story about children killed
and children maimed (Maha, paralyzed; Ahmed, blinded—my notebook a mess of
loss and sorrow). As the bombs continued to fall in 2014, Pernille
Ironside, then-chief of the Gaza office of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF)
said <https://news.un.org/en/story/2014/08/475622>that 373,000 children
needed “immediate psycho-social first aid.” There were simply not enough
counselors to help the children, most of whom are now hardened because of
the ugliness of occupation and war.

The violence that they experience has become a daily affair. But this kind
of violence can never be mundane. “I am scared,” said Hind Rajab. I
remember meeting a little boy who was playing with a football on the
streets of al-Mughraqa. His father, who was showing me around, told me that
the boy was not able to sleep, but would stay awake at night and cry. That
was in 2014. That boy must now be in his early twenties. He might not be
alive.

*One or Two Legs*

An Al Jazeera interactive website
<https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2024/israel-war-on-gaza-10000-children-killed/>
has
the names of the children killed since October 2023, one killed every
fifteen minutes; as I scrolled down the names, I felt ill, and then found
this at the very end: “These are the names of only half of the children
killed.” In early May, UNICEF director Catherine Russell said
<https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/statement-unicef-executive-director-catherine-russell-military-operations-and-border>,
“Nearly all of Gaza’s children have been exposed to the traumatic
experiences of war, the consequences of which will last a lifetime.” In her
statement, where she reported that 14,000 children have been killed, she
said that “an estimated 17,000 children are unaccompanied or separated.”
These numbers are estimates and are likely to be undercounts.

A new report <https://www.savethechildren.net/gaza-missing-children> from
Save the Children suggests that over 20,000 children are missing in Gaza.
They are either under the rubble, detained by the Israeli military, or
buried in mass graves. During a detailed briefing on June 25, the
Commissioner-General of the UN Palestine Agency (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini
said
<https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/official-statements/press-briefing-commissioner-general-philippe-lazzarini-during-meeting>
something
staggering: “And you take into consideration that basically, we have every
10 days children losing one leg or two legs on average. This gives you an
idea of the scope of the type of childhood a child can have in Gaza.”

The story should not be real. It was the morning of December 19, 2023.
Israeli tanks rumbled through the neighborhood of Rimal in Gaza City.
Seventeen-year-old Ahed Bseiso was on the top floor of a six-floor building
trying to call her father in Belgium to tell him that she was still alive.
She heard a loud noise, fell, and called out for her sister Mona and her
mother. Her family rushed up, carried her down, and laid her on the kitchen
table where her mother had been making bread. Ahed’s uncle Hani Bseiso, an
orthopedic doctor, looked at her leg and realized that he would have to
either amputate it or she would die. He grabbed whatever supplies he could
find and conducted the amputation without anesthesia. Ahed recited verses
from the Quran to calm herself. Hani wept as he did the operation, which
the family filmed and later posed on YouTube, which was reposted
<https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6CqGKalLduI> in many places.

These are the stories of Gaza.

*This article was produced by Globetrotter <https://globetrotter.media/>. *

*Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal:
Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August
2022).*
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