Henry A. Giroux
Truthout / December 21, 2024
Children in Gaza are not merely collateral damage; they are often actively being targeted.
In November, over a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a report by the Gaza-based Community Training Center for Crisis Management produced a grim statistic: “Nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believe their death is imminent — and nearly half of them want to die.”
It is no wonder why the statistic, which came from a survey of families with disabled, injured or unaccompanied children, is so bleak. Amnesty International’s recent report lays bare the magnitude of the crisis: “Israel’s actions … have brought Gaza’s population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families.”
This unfathomable suffering — inflicted disproportionately on women and children — represents a moral abomination, a political travesty, and a militaristic cruelty of the highest order. The destruction of lives, institutions and essential humanitarian infrastructure goes beyond the annihilation of a people; it constitutes an assault on future generations and the very fabric of our shared humanity. Genocidal language dehumanizes and legitimizes the unthinkable: an indiscriminate war waged against the most defenseless — children.
Israel’s war on Palestinian youth is genocidal — not only in the starvation, maiming and unimaginable killing of children but in its relentless assault on any viable notion of what it means for these young people to be valued, human and alive with hope. It seeks to strip them of their dignity, rendering them invisible and unworthy in the eyes of the world, as if their lives are expendable, their dreams inconsequential. This overpowering violence amounts to what we may term childcide, which is the deliberate or systematic destruction of children, whether through direct violence, neglect, or the conditions of war and oppression that render them uniquely vulnerable. It is a traumatic manifestation of collective failure — a war against innocence, in which the fragile promise of childhood is extinguished before it can bloom. In Gaza, where children face relentless bombings, displacement and deprivation, childcide becomes not just an act of violence but a moral collapse: the erasure of futures, dreams and entire generations. It is a crime not only against the child but against humanity itself, leaving behind a void that no words can fill and no justice can fully repair.
In the U.S., the violence of childcide manifests more covertly in the censorship and repression of free speech driven by right-wing politicians, neoliberal educators and a reactionary billionaire donor class. This assault seeks to stifle the imagination and critical capacities of young people, eroding their ability to envision a more just future.
In Gaza, childcide takes on an overt and devastating form. The violence there kills and maims children, denies them lifesaving medical treatment, and robs them of their futures — sometimes their very limbs. The scale of this horror is staggering, matched only by the indifference or active complicity of nations like the United States, whose silence or direct support fuels this mass atrocity.
Under the incoming Trump administration, these forms of childcide in both the U.S. and Gaza are likely to intensify.
The war on children
In October, close to 100 U.S. health care providers who have volunteered in the Gaza Strip over the past year sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris detailing “every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.” Put differently, many of these children were deliberately killed by Israeli snipers and other troops.
This violence is not merely an attack on bodies but on the spirit, denying Palestinians the right to be seen as fully human, to belong to a community that nurtures their future, and to inhabit a world where intimacy and compassion prevail over violence and despair. Such cruelty is not just a crime against a people — it is a wound to the very essence of our shared existence.
The face of childcide was on full display for the world to see when news reports and videos circulated revealing a teenage boy, Sha’ban al-Dalou, burning alive in a tent in a refugee camp which had been hit by an Israeli airstrike. Zak Witus, writing in The Guardian describes what he saw:
I clicked on the accompanying video and I could not believe what I saw: an inferno blazing, people running around screaming, and there, amidst the flame, a body writhing, crackling; a raised arm, reaching out for help, still attached to an IV. I waited for the following morning to share the video, until the event had been reported by reputable news outlets, because the images appeared too gruesome to be real — like they were something out of a movie — but they were real: an Israeli airstrike hit near the grounds of al-Aqsa Martyrs’ hospital in the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah and killed at least four people. The man that we saw burning alive? His name was Sha’ban al-Dalou, a 19-year-old software engineering student.
The killing of Sha’ban al-Dalou is not an isolated act — it is part of a war of annihilation. How can any nation continue to support Israel, a rogue state pursuing a policy of extermination? How can the U.S., with full knowledge of this genocidal war waged with impunity, not act to oppose it? This is not just a war of brutality — it is also a damning indictment of Western European nations, who pride themselves on being democracies yet remain complicit through their refusal to condemn or obstruct the mass killing and extermination of Palestinian women and children. The evil of fascism lies not only in its acts of systemic violence but also in the silence of those who enable, justify and profit from it.
As Iain Overton, executive director of the United Kingdom-based group Action on Armed Violence, notes, “The world’s failure to protect Gaza’s children is a moral failing on a monumental scale. We must act decisively and compassionately to ensure that these children’s voices are heard and their futures protected.” Parliament member Jeremy Corbyn goes further, stating that, “Every single supplier of arms to Israel has blood on its hands — and the world will never forgive them.”
Of all those complicit, the Biden administration has the most blood on its hands. Even as Biden’s presidency comes to an end and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been declared a war criminal by the International Court of Justice, Biden refuses to end the U.S.’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes. As Jeffrey D. Sachs notes, Biden has turned “the U.S. military and federal budget over to Netanyahu for his disastrous wars … which have been an unmitigated disaster for the American people, bleeding the U.S. Treasury of trillions of dollars, squandering America’s standing in the world, making the U.S. Complicit in his genocidal policies, and bringing the world closer to World War III.”
Gaza is a warning
The elimination of the Palestinian people and the genocidal war against its children are not merely a campaign of death; they are a calculated assault on history, heritage and memory, systematically erasing an entire generation and leaving behind a void where lives, dreams and the promise of a future once flourished. This assault is being committed by an authoritarian state sustained by a cruelty so profound it extinguishes any semblance of morality, justice or freedom, leaving only the desolation of unchecked cruelty. James Baldwin once wrote, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” Today, this form of immorality is everywhere — it has become a signifier of power, a weapon wielded by those who conflate might with right.
The dream of democracy, once a beacon of hope, has been hollowed out by the militarized machinery of death. In Gaza, this machinery lays bare its darkest truth: Children are not only expendable but deliberately targeted, their deaths a chilling symbol of a deeper intent. Here, the global war on youth reaches its most grotesque conclusion. The bodies of Palestinian children litter the ruins of Gaza, serving as grim declarations — a warning that not only fighters and militants must be extinguished, but the very possibility of a Palestinian future must be annihilated.
What is unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated atrocity; it is a preview of the insidious fascism colonizing the globe. The deliberate targeting of the most vulnerable reveals a chilling calculus of power, one that sees children not as the bearers of hope but as obstacles to a supremacist vision of conquest. Their destruction is meant to erase not only their lives but also the memory and resilience of their people, ensuring that the very idea of Palestine is consigned to oblivion.
This is the bitter lesson of our time: the war on youth, waged in countless ways across the world, finds its endpoint in Gaza. There, children are not merely collateral damage; they are the targets of a brutal ideology that seeks to eradicate the possibility of a Palestinian tomorrow. If we cannot rise to this moment, if we cannot defend the sanctity of childhood and the universality of human rights, we risk forfeiting what it means to be human — as well as the ideals, promises and hopes for a radical democracy.
How we resist
Resistance must begin by exposing the fascist threat for what it truly is — a systemic and calculated assault on democracy, justice and human dignity. This is not simply a matter of defending the rule of law; it demands a mobilization of collective passions and civic courage to fight repression and ignite mass resistance. The fight for justice can only commence with a clear recognition of the state of injustice that grips the U.S. today. This is both a political and pedagogical imperative.
For resistance to be lasting and meaningful, people must grasp not only how these violations shape their own lives but also how they harm their neighbours and erode the broader social fabric. This recognition fosters solidarity, building the foundation for resistance that is rooted in shared purpose and mutual accountability.
When the political and the personal intersect, thinking becomes a form of action. It is this interplay — between the intimate realities of individual lives and the structural conditions of the social order — that fuels movements capable of transformative change. Only then can resistance transcend fleeting gestures and ignite a sustained fight for justice and democracy.
We must create spaces and strategies that enable people to question, think critically and reclaim their agency. This means investing not only in direct action but also in educational efforts that cultivate a collective understanding of how capitalism and imperialism dehumanize and divide, eroding both social responsibility and democratic ideals. Resistance requires not just acts of defiance but the formation of a new language, a new imaginary, and new institutions capable of inspiring solidarity and sustaining a culture of resistance.
The intertwined crises of scholasticide and childcide represent not merely a breakdown in politics and morality but a failure of ideas and critical consciousness. What is needed is an ongoing struggle over ideas — a battle for radical imagination and awareness as the foundation for mass resistance. The staggering inequalities of wealth and power must not only be named and addressed but systematically dismantled. The stakes are too high to ignore: democracy itself, the lives of the marginalized, the futures of young people, and the survival of the planet are all at risk.
Palestine exemplifies the resilience and power of such resistance, where education under siege becomes a weapon against erasure, and the act of learning transforms into a form of defiance.
Popular education initiatives, underground schools and steadfast communities refusing to abandon their heritage are living testimonies to the unyielding Palestinian character. The spirit of Palestinian resistance embodies the moral and political essence of collective courage, unwavering determination and an unrelenting struggle for freedom, justice and sovereignty against overwhelming odds. Their struggle reveals that even in the face of unrelenting oppression, the collective imagination for justice and freedom can thrive.
In her poem, “We Teach Life, Sir,” Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah touches on these themes, refuting a common refrain from U.S. pundits that Palestinians “teach their children to hate.” Instead, Ziadah asserts, “We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky. We teach life after they have built their settlements and apartheid walls, after the last skies.” A multiracial, multi-class movement must absorb these lessons of life. We must draw inspiration from this steadfastness, transcending its divisions, and uniting around a shared commitment to confronting and defeating both Trumpism and the neoliberal fascism that made it possible.
As I have argued before, under these circumstances and at this juncture in history, resistance is not optional — it is an absolute necessity. To resist is to reclaim hope, justice and the possibility of a radically better future, drawing strength from the enduring examples of those who, like Palestinians, refuse to relinquish their humanity or their dreams for liberation.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy
