[News] The Children of Gaza Are Freezing to Death

[Anti-Imperialist News]

counterpunch.org
<https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/01/10/the-children-of-gaza-are-freezing-to-death/>
The Children of Gaza Are Freezing to Death
Vijay Prashad
January 10, 2025
------------------------------

Photograph Source: rajatonvimma /// VJ Group Random Doctors – CC BY 2.0
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/>

>From early December 2024 to early January 2025, the body temperature of
eight babies fell below any acceptable amount and they froze to death. This
condition is known as hypothermia. The most recent of these children to
die, Yousef, was sleeping beside his mother because, as she told
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/5/i-refuse-a-cheap-death-israel-kills-palestinian-journalist-in-gaza>
Al Jazeera, of the very cold weather. Temperatures in Gaza have fallen to
just above freezing, which in the context of a lack of housing, blankets,
and warm bedclothes is deadly. Body heat is the only protection, which is
minimal for an infant. Yousef’s mother said, “He slept next to me and in
the morning I found him frozen and dead. I don’t know what to say. No one
can feel my misery. No one in the world can understand our catastrophic
situation.”

Each of these stories is incomprehensible. The al-Batran family in Deir
al-Balah are living in a tent made of blue plastic. Their bedding is only
acceptable to them because their entire household has been destroyed, and
they have not received any relief. Twin brothers Ali and Jumaa were born
during this ugly genocidal bombardment in November 2024, but then one after
the other succumbed to hypothermia. When the father felt Jumma’s head, it
was
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/30/sixth-baby-freezes-to-death-in-gaza-as-israel-raids-hospitals>
as “cold as ice.”

By early January 2025, studies by the United Nations and the Palestinian
government showed
<https://pmo.pna.ps/public/files/image/122024/20241230_GCC_SituationReport%20(1).pdf>
that at least 92 percent of housing units in Gaza had been destroyed. Most
Palestinians who remain in northern Gaza have no homes in which to shelter.
They are living in makeshift tents, not even having access to the United
Nations tents that are sparsely available. Because there are now no
hospitals open in northern Gaza, children are being born in these tents,
and they are not receiving any medical care. “The health sector is being
systematically dismantled,” Dr. Rik Peeperkorn of the World Health
Organization told <https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1158741> the United
Nations Security Council on January 3. In the so-called “safe zone” of
al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis, three babies died
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/26/three-babies-freeze-to-death-in-gaza-refugee-camp>
of hypothermia, mocking the idea that this is indeed a safe zone. Mahmoud
al-Faseeh, the father of Sila Mahmoud al-Faseeh (who died in her third
week), told Al Jazeera, “We sleep on the sand and we don’t have enough
blankets and we feel the cold inside our tent.” The story is the same up
and down Gaza’s length: the cold has come at night, ceaseless rain has made
everything damp, the tents are inadequate, the blankets are thread worn,
and the infants—the most vulnerable—have begun to die.

The map of such suffering is not restricted to Gaza or to the Palestinians.
Such stories of a parent walking to find their child beside them in an
inadequate tent, with no blankets because of the lack of relief in a war
zone, are sadly not unique. The children frozen in the Kabul slum of
Chaman-e-Babrak in 2012 had names that are utterly forgotten outside their
families. These were victims of a war that trudged on and threw these rural
Afghans into cities where they lived in glorified plastic bags. Similarly,
there is little memory of the precious infants who froze to death in the
unnamed camps north of Idlib, Syria, along the Turkish border. The parents
of these children went from tent to tent over a decade, trying desperately
to find a stable life. Some of their children froze to death; other
families perished as their dangerous heaters in these plastic tents set
their entire families on fire.

*Wars on Civilians*

War zones are no longer places where combatants fight each other. They have
become charnel houses for civilians, and entire populations taken hostage
and brutalized. In May 2024, before the full toll of the Israeli genocide
had been measured, the UN Secretary-General provided a report
<https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/110/29/pdf/n2411029.pdf> to the
Security Council on civilian deaths. The data is stunning:

The United Nations recorded at least 33,443 civilian deaths in armed
conflicts in 2023, a 72 percent increase as compared with 2022. The
proportion of women and children killed doubled and tripled, respectively,
as compared with 2022. In 2023, 4 out of every 10 civilians killed in
conflicts were women, and 3 out of 10 were children. Seven out of 10
recorded deaths occurred in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel,
making it the deadliest conflict for civilians in 2023.

The number regarding the Occupied Palestine Territory includes the Israeli
violence from October to December 2023, but not the violence that
intensified across the entirety of 2024. Those numbers will come later this
year.

A look backward at the post-9/11 Western wars on Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Iraq, Syria, and Yemen shows the bleakness of the general attitude toward
civilians in these parts of the world. The direct deaths from the bombs and
the gunfire have been calculated
<https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll> to be
nearly one million, an enormous underestimation but still a very large
number. Adding in excess deaths, including from starvation and hypothermia,
the toll is calculated
<https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/IndirectDeaths> to be
nearing five million, also an underestimation but at least indicative of
the impact on these parts of the world.

On August 29, 2021, two U.S. MQ-9 Reapers hovered
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/afghanistan-drone-strike-video.html>
over a white Toyota Corolla that had pulled into a parking area of a
multi-family home in Kabul’s working-class Khwaja Burgha neighborhood. The
U.S. drone operators, who had tracked the car for the past eight hours,
watched as a man left the car, as a group of people came to greet him, and
as one person took out a black bag from the rear seat of the car. At that
point, the U.S. decided to fire a hellfire missile at the man and the
people around him. They were all killed. It turned out that the man, Zemari
Ahmadi, was not a member of the enemy group ISIS-K, but was an employee of
a California-based non-governmental organization called Nutrition and
Education International <https://www.neifoundation.org/> (NEI). The people
who came to greet him from inside the house were his children,
grandchildren, and their cousins. The black bag, which the U.S. claimed
might have had explosives, carried a laptop from NEI, and another bag
carried water bottles. The secondary explosion that the operators saw on
their video feed was not from a bomb but from a propane tank in the carport.

The list of people killed by the United States on that day should give one
pause because of the youth of so many of them: Zemari Ahmadi (age 43),
Naser Haidari (age 30), Zamir (age 20), Faisal (age 16), Farzad (age 10),
Arwin (age 7), Benyamen (age 6), Malika (age 6), Ayat (age 2), and Sumaya
(age 2). This is the last U.S. drone strike before the U.S. withdrawal from
Afghanistan. Not one U.S. soldier was charged with the murder, let alone
found guilty. Not one Israeli soldier will be charged or found guilty of
the deaths of the Palestinian children in Gaza. This is the impunity that
defines the assault on civilians, including those little Palestinian babies
freezing to death in their blue tents, lying beside desperate parents.

*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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