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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/05/the-unbelievable-stories-about-the-children-of-gaza/">counterpunch.org</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">The Unbelievable Stories About the Children of Gaza</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Vijay Prashad</div>
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<div class="gmail-reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">July 5, 2024<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div>
<div id="gmail-attachment_327334" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-327334" src="https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/mohammed-ibrahim-CFHOBqIm7PM-unsplash-680x453.jpg" alt="" width="408" height="272" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-327334" class="gmail-wp-caption-text">Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.</p></div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Not far down the road, the car came under fire from Israeli military
vehicles, including Merkava tanks. According to a remarkable <a href="https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-hind-rajab">investigation</a> by UK-based research agency Forensic Architecture, 355 bullets were fired into the car.</p>
<p>One of those in the car, a six-year-old child named Hind Rajab, called emergency workers. “They are dead,” she <a href="https://x.com/PalestineRCS/status/1759285054369304869">says</a> 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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.state.gov/?post_type=state_briefing&%3Bp=92333">say</a> 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.</p>
<p>The murder of Hind Rajab and her family shocked the world (Hind Rajab’s father was <a href="https://x.com/jeremyscahill/status/1807868423092789298">killed</a> 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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgDQyFeBBIo&rco=1">song</a> in May called “Hind’s Hall.”</p>
<p><strong>Everyday Violence</strong></p>
<p>June 14: One child was <a href="https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/145043">killed</a> by Israeli airstrikes in Zeitoun (Gaza City).</p>
<p>June 22: Two children were <a href="https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/145200">killed</a> by Israeli airstrikes in Shujaiya (Gaza City).</p>
<p>June 25: Two children were <a href="https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/145278">killed</a> by Israeli fire on al-Wahda Street, near Al-Shifa Hospital (Gaza City).</p>
<p>June 25: Three children were <a href="https://english.wafa.ps/Pages/Details/145271">killed</a> by Israeli airstrikes in the Maghazi refugee camp.</p>
<p>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) <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2014/08/475622">said</a>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>One or Two Legs</strong></p>
<p>An Al Jazeera interactive <a href="https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2024/israel-war-on-gaza-10000-children-killed/">website</a> 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 <a href="https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/statement-unicef-executive-director-catherine-russell-military-operations-and-border">said</a>,
“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.</p>
<p>A new <a href="https://www.savethechildren.net/gaza-missing-children">report</a> 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 <a href="https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/official-statements/press-briefing-commissioner-general-philippe-lazzarini-during-meeting">said</a> 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.”</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6CqGKalLduI">reposted</a> in many places.</p>
<p>These are the stories of Gaza.</p>
<p><em>This article was produced by <a href="https://globetrotter.media/">Globetrotter</a>. </em></p>
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<em>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).</em>
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