Nesrine Malik
The Guardian / January 27, 2025
There is no way to rationalise the horrors inflicted on Gaza’s innocent children. Now is the time to mourn them fully.
For the past week, Palestinians in Gaza have been returning to their homes, now mostly reduced to rubble – and to their dead who still lie beneath. It is only now that we will start to get a fuller picture of the true toll of this war – only now that any kind of grieving or mourning can begin, a process that has been physically and emotionally denied to the Palestinians throughout the past 15 months. Once the final tally becomes clear, what will probably emerge is a colossal death toll of children.
Already, indications point to it being children that have made up the majority of casualties. UN analysis of verified deaths during a five-month period confirmed that of those who died, 44% were children. Most often, those children were five- to nine-year-olds; 80% of them killed in their own homes.
I would like you to pause with me here for a moment, at least for the duration of this column, and allow those statistics to become tragedies. Too often, individual losses during this war have been subsumed by a broader tussle over whether the numbers of the dead were correct, whether they were justified and even necessary. And now, a ceasefire pulls our gaze away from mortality and into analysis of what can and should come next. This is an exercise that needs to be done, of course. Millions in Gaza are still by no means out of mortal danger, their future is uncertain and they need protection now. But, in that, there is a risk of diminishing or sanitising what happened. And what happened is that thousands of innocent people died, and among them were thousands of children.
The horror is not just that they died. But how they died. In maximum terror. Many in their own homes, on shaking earth, among the cacophony and screeches of bombs, then either pulverised or smothered, to be pulled out dusted grey in complexion, or in pieces to be gathered in plastic bags. Others died in maximum pain, as lack of anaesthetic and medical supplies meant that some succumbed to injury without relief. Others perished after having their limbs amputated without a single dose of painkiller.
Thousands of moments of panic and agony leading up to a death that was almost certain. Most of these final moments were not witnessed by any who lived to tell the tale, nor reported. But in the case of a few, such as five-year-old Hind Rajab, there is a haunting glimpse into the sort of horror they suffered. She was killed among her dead relatives, alone after pleading with emergency services on the phone to rescue her. The line died after sounds of gunfire.
We have only seen and heard the stories of a minuscule number of these children: the infants found decomposing in intensive care, the babies who froze to death, the children lying dead on a steel tray, their names written in black ink on their bodies by their parents so they could be identified. Each one of those deaths is a singular tragedy: a child robbed of a future, of a chance to find out who they are, to know the world, to be a person. Now multiply that by thousands.
Do so, and try to get your head around the scale of what was allowed to happen, not for morbid indulgence, but because in the justification for what has been done to Gaza’s children hides the most extreme form of dehumanisation from which all Palestinians suffer. None is more innocent than a child, their death the most unassailable proof of the injustice of this war; how it was conducted, accepted and supported. None is more universally relatable than a child, devoid of politics, of responsibility, of understanding of a world that to them is merely a playground.
None is more impulsively protected than a child. It is why the suffering of children thousands of miles away moves us so profoundly even when we do not know them; in them we see the children in our own lives, all similar in their mischief and exuberance and blooming individuality. In withdrawing into reasoning – that war is hell, that the responsibility lies with Hamas for triggering the war, that collateral damage is inevitable – we fail to register what happened to Gaza’s children with proportionate grief, and our very instincts become warped.
That desensitisation can be a dangerous thing. It risks extending to those children who survived; the almost 40,000 orphans, the thousands of amputees, the hundreds of thousands who are displaced and whose schools have been destroyed, and the “complete psychological destruction” that all children who have lived through the war have suffered. Even if the ceasefire does herald the end of the war, there is no doubt Gaza’s youngest generation will limp forward into a dark future if the world cannot locate its empathy and an epic marshalling of crucial aid and support is not extended. In a plea to the security council last week, the United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs made that case for the maimed, orphaned, displaced and traumatised. “The children of Gaza are not collateral damage,” Tom Fletcher said. “They are as deserving as children everywhere of security, education and hope. They tell us that the world was not there for them throughout this war. We must be there for them now.”
Those who have died also still have rights – they deserve mourning, something that has been withheld from all who have been killed. Many have not even been given the respect of a decent burial. Twenty thousand children are still missing, still under the rubble or dumped in mass graves. With the erasure of much of Gaza’s infrastructure and the suspension of normal life caused by the war, their deaths have accumulated and passed into statistical anonymity. The majority have had no funerals, no prayers, no moments of silence, no celebration of their lives, their spirit, their personalities, each unique. They gather in a column of names on a list, of numbers so high, without detail or eulogising, that they somehow imply that in its facelessness and lack of recognition, the killing of children is an industrial byproduct. It is not. It was avoidable, unnecessary and only permitted because Palestinian life as a whole has been made cheap by the logic of Israel’s absolute right to defend itself by whatever criminal means it likes. Because the world was not there for them.
But all the concerted efforts made to lessen the value of the lives of those who died do not make it a fact. Before we hurtle to the next stage of Gaza’s calamity, we owe it to them, and ourselves, whatever our politics, to pause and open ourselves up to the fullness of the little lives that were snatched away. Goodbye to the children of Gaza. You were loved, you are remembered, you did not deserve it.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
