[News] Why Israel wants to kill the children of Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

middleeasteye.net 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/why-israel-wants-kill-palestinian-children-gaza> 



  Why Israel wants to kill the children of Gaza

Linah Alsaafin
July 17, 2025
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Palestinian children queue for hot food distributed by a charity kitchen 
at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, 15 July 2025 (Eyad Baba/AFP)

Palestinian children queue for hot food distributed by a charity kitchen 
at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, 15 July 2025 (Eyad Baba/AFP)

The western-backed Israeli 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel> genocide in the Gaza 
Strip <https://www.middleeasteye.net/topics/israel-war-gaza> has entered 
its deadliest phase, and the world continues to slumber on.

This summer has marked an uptick in the daily killing of Palestinians 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine> - an average of 100 
lives massacred each day, most of them already contending with the pangs 
of hunger amid a man-made mass starvation campaign.

The small coastal territory, blockaded by Egypt 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/egypt> and Israel with the 
complicity of the international community, is now the most dangerous 
place in the world for children, who make up about half the population.

As early as 31 October 2023, Unicef described 
<https://www.khaleejtimes.com/world/mena/gaza-now-a-graveyard-for-thousands-of-children-says-un> 
Gaza as "a graveyard for children, a living hell for everyone else". 
This has been echoed 
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-chief-says-gaza-becoming-graveyard-children-2023-11-06/> 
by numerous UN officials, most recently last Friday by the UN refugee 
agency chief, Philippe Lazzarini, who warned 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/11/the-graveyard-of-children-unrwa-chief-slams-israels-slaughter-in-gaza> 
of Israel's "Machiavellian scheme to kill" in Gaza.

Missiles and shrapnel rip through the fragile bodies of children in open 
marketplaces, at water collection points, at aid distribution sites, and 
while waiting in line for nutritional supplements.

Children are bombed inside displacement tents, burned alive in school 
shelters and buried beneath the rubble of their homes. Even before they 
are born, foetuses are blown from their mothers' wombs by the force of 
bombs.

Last week, the decapitated body of eight-month-old foetus Saeed Samer 
al-Laqqa <https://www.instagram.com/p/DL5PMaDIfgn/?hl=en&img_index=2> - 
documented in footage widely shared on social media - failed to register 
even a mention in mainstream media.

His absence from the headlines is part of the institutional silence that 
has sustained Israel's genocidal project for more than 21 months.

Even when their deaths are acknowledged, the children of Gaza are 
reduced to little more than casualty figures.

But their killing has never been collateral damage: it is a deliberate 
effort to extinguish a future Israel fears: a generation of Palestinians 
born under siege, whose survival, memory, and innate human desire for 
freedom and dignity threaten the foundations of a settler-colonial state 
built on their erasure.


      Prison to martyrdom

On 12 July, Youssef al-Zaq 
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-kills-world-s-youngest-freed-prisoner-in-gaza-airstrike/3629139>, 
barely 17 years old, was killed alongside his niece and nephew, Maria 
and Tamim, in an Israeli attack on their building in Gaza City.

Youssef, once known as the youngest Palestinian hostage, was born in an 
Israeli prison in 2008.

    'Youssef's birth and story exposed the occupation. That's why they
    didn't want him to stay alive'

    /- Ahmed Sahmoud, Youssef's cousin/

His mother, Fatema al-Zaq, was arrested in 2007 while attempting to 
cross into the occupied West Bank and, during the early stages of her 
captivity, learned she was two months pregnant.

"The Israeli occupation tortured his mother so that she would miscarry," 
Youssef's cousin Ahmed Sahmoud told me.

Fatema gave birth to a healthy baby boy, but her arms and legs were 
shackled during labour, and she received minimal medical care from 
Israeli prison guards.

Youssef spent the first 20 months of his life behind bars. In 2009, he 
and his mother, along with 19 other Palestinian female detainees, were 
released in exchange for a video showing Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit alive.

"There was a lot of attention on Youssef after he came home," said 
Sahmoud, a journalist who escaped Gaza last year and now lives in Egypt.

"The al-Zaq family called him the flower of the family. He was a quiet 
boy, and very much loved in his neighbourhood," he added.

The youngest of eight siblings, Youssef was determined to live a full 
life and longed to travel.

But Sahmoud said the family believes Youssef was deliberately targeted 
by Israel: "Youssef's birth and story exposed the occupation. That's why 
they didn't want him to stay alive," his cousin said, citing Israel's 
history of targeting and killing former Palestinian detainees.

"The Israelis resented the fact that Youssef, who was born in their 
prison, was released. He represented a victory over them, a new lease of 
life.

"I can't explain to you the special place Youssef held in the family," 
Sahmoud said. "His martyrdom left a massive hole. The Zionist occupation 
army snuffed out the family's source of light."


      Dehumanising children

Youssef's story should not be the quintessential tale of childhood in 
Gaza. He was born in a prison and lived the rest of his life in an 
open-air cage.

He witnessed multiple Israeli assaults. He lived through nearly two 
years of genocide. He died hungry, sharing a single piece of bread with 
his niece and nephew. He was pulled from the rubble of his home.

Death has become a grim constant over the past 21 months. More than 
17,000 children have been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry 
- a severe undercount that excludes the missing and the untold thousands 
still buried under rubble.

Even so, that number means an average of 30 children have been killed by 
Israel every day since 7 October 2023 - equivalent to one classroom, or 
one child every 45 minutes 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2025/3/26/gazas-stolen-childhood-the-thousands-of-children-israel-killed>.

How does one begin to explain, let alone comprehend, Israel's 
disproportionate and deliberate targeting of children?

With its advanced weaponry, surveillance and control over the population 
registry, these killings are not accidental - they are codified into policy.

 From the earliest days of this genocide, Israeli Prime Minister 
Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical story of Amalek 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMVs7akyMh0> to justify mass killing in 
Gaza, including children.

In Gaza, children are learning the alphabet through grief and hunger

Ghada Abu Muaileq

Read More » 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-children-are-learning-alphabet-through-grief-and-hunger> 


The killing and maiming of children - still a war crime 
<https://childrenandarmedconflict.un.org/six-grave-violations/killing-and-maiming/>under 
international law - has been given full legitimacy, and even 
encouragement 
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/jewish-rabbi-encourages-killing-gazans-even-children/3159767>, 
through the rulings of Zionist rabbis and the rhetoric of Israeli 
government ministers.

With such dehumanising language and fear of the other, these figures 
openly call for the extermination of Palestinian children and "the women 
<https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/jewish-rabbi-encourages-killing-gazans-even-children/3159767> 
who produce terrorists".

They proclaim <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuC2C4VYuvg> that "there 
are no innocents in Gaza", that every Palestinian child is "already a 
terrorist <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuC2C4VYuvg> from the moment 
of his birth".

To that end, Israel has been consistent. Since the settler colony's 
founding in 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has never 
stopped. Genocide is no longer just an intention; it is official 
strategy. "Thinning out 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/netanyahu-wants-thin-out-gazas-population-pushing-them-sea-report>" 
Gaza's population is now formal government policy.


      Social collapse

Why the children of Gaza? One million children in Gaza represent a 
growing youth population 
<https://www.npr.org/2023/10/19/1206479861/israel-gaza-hamas-children-population-war-palestinians> 
- a demographic challenge to an Israeli society that knows, deep down, 
it does not belong to a land it has drenched in Palestinian blood.

Otherwise, why would it persist in violent subjugation and state murder? 
What kind of twisted psyche boasts of killing children and sees it as a 
divine right? Who celebrates the murder of innocents and sees their 
existence as a threat?

Targeting children serves another nefarious purpose: a calculated 
assault on the social reproduction of an indigenous society.

<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-waging-war-palestinian-children-why#autoplay>

Why Israel is waging war on Palestinian children

Read More » 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-waging-war-palestinian-children-why#autoplay> 


The goal is to collapse communal bonds and societal structures. There is 
the fast genocide of bombs and missiles, and the slow genocide of 
starvation, mass internment, and the decimation of healthcare 
<https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1158741> - creating a petri dish 
of disease where children are the most vulnerable.

 From this chaos - designed to break the spirit of liberation and 
justice - colonial powers exploit the vacuum to expand 
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-announces-new-west-bank-settlements-despite-sanctions-threat-2025-05-29/> 
illegal settlements and plunder 
<https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/3/6/israel-is-pillaging-not-just-gazas-cities-but-also-its-waters> 
natural resources.

During the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the British 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uk> confined 1.5 million 
Kenyans in detention camps and tightly controlled villages rife with 
disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.

"Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million 
people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women and 
children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission 
reinstated," Harvard historian Caroline Elkins 
<https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-truth-british-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau> 
wrote.

In Algeria <https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/algeria>, too, in 
response to anti-colonial resistance from the FLN, the French forcibly 
rounded up thousands of peasants at gunpoint and relocated them to 
guarded settlements known as camps de regroupement.

The aim was to drain public support from the FLN by isolating the rural 
population, controlling their movements, and restricting access to 
resources.

By the end of the Algerian War 
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/france-algeria-israel-settler-colonies-arab-world> 
in 1962, some two million Algerians were confined to these camps, 
suffering from disease and malnutrition.


      Future freedom fighters

 From the British to the French to the Israelis, settler-colonial 
tactics have followed the same brutal logic - even as their scale and 
cruelty have evolved.

Across time and geography, the settler-colonial project has relied not 
only on physical conquest but also on the erasure of identity, the 
fragmentation of community, and the suppression of future resistance.

    To a violent colonising power, a child with a book, a dream, or a
    memory is more dangerous than any weapon

Again I ask: why the children of Gaza?

They represent exactly that future - one rooted in knowledge and 
historical memory.

In a society with one of the highest literacy rates 
<https://cupblog.org/2023/08/23/why-palestinians-are-known-as-the-worlds-best-educated-refugeesanne-irfan/> 
in the region, despite decades of siege and bombardment, educated youth 
are not only symbols of survival; they are agents of liberation.

To a violent colonising power, a child with a book, a dream, or a memory 
is more dangerous than any weapon.

Targeting children, then, is not collateral damage. It is strategy. It 
is part of a broader campaign to destroy hope, overwrite the future, and 
maintain the machinery of occupation through fear and erasure.

/The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not 
necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye/.

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