By Iqbal Suleman
Just as head chopping was central to Daesh as an expression of its military prowess and power, killing babies and children is central to Israel as an expression of its dominance in occupied Palestine. No one loves head chopping more than Daesh, and no one loves killing children more than Israel. That’s the message which comes through loud and clear on a near daily basis.
Such barbarism is cloaked in a religious garb but everything that Daesh does is contrary to the human rights and justice at the core of Islam, and everything that Israel does is contrary to the human rights and justice enshrined within Judaism. Israel and Daesh profess to be Jewish and Islamic State respectively, but the savagery of their conduct is more satanic than Godly.
The very notion of killing babies and children should be anathema to every human being, so what is it about the Zionist psychology that actualizes baby killing? After the 7 October cross-border incursion by Hamas, South Africa’s Sunday Times reported the words of Saar Ben Hamoo, a South African Zionist and ardent supporter of Israel: “We will drink the blood of your children in Gaza,” he declared. The Zionist Ben Hamoo is guilty of hate speech, but also gave expression to Zionist infanticide in advance of Israel launching its genocide in Gaza.
Prior to last October, no one could have imagined the mercilessness of Israeli Zionists and their supporters in their desire to commit infanticide. How did Ben Hamoo know that baby killing would feature prominently in the genocide being carried out in revenge for 7 October?
Was it a guess? Or wishful thinking?
It is natural for human beings to express love, kindness and gentleness towards a child, whether a relative or a stranger. Anyone who thinks about hurting a child or even tries to hurt a child is considered a degenerate. To deliberately break the limbs of a child or even think about killing a child is beyond comprehension for normal people. The killing of a child has to be the most repulsive act that a human being can commit, but this is exactly what Israeli Zionists have been doing and continue to do in occupied Palestine, without compassion, and with full impunity.
In October 2023, after the outbreak of the Gaza war, Al Jazeera reported that Israel kills a Palestinian child every fifteen minutes. A recent article for MEMO pointed out that, “Israel has killed, on average, two Palestinian children every day for the past 24 years.”
The Vice Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Bragi Gudbransson, told reporters on 19 September, “The outrageous death of children is almost historically unique. This is an extremely dark place in history.” The CRC monitors governments’ compliance with the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and released its findings about six governments, including the Israel regime.
The report states that the committee “is greatly concerned about the high number of children in Gaza killed, maimed, injured, missing, displaced, orphaned and subjected to famine, malnutrition and disease as a result of Israel’s “indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks.”
A week ago, the Gaza health ministry published the names of 710 new-born Palestinian babies killed by Israeli forces during the ongoing war. Since 7 October, the confirmed number of Palestinian children killed by Israel is 16,700. Moreover, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in June that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza as a result of Israel’s military attack on the enclave. Most of these missing children are presumed dead under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by Israel. At the very least, therefore, it is fair to say that the Zionist state has slaughtered 36,700 children in Gaza since last October alone.
Although UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez has said that, “Gaza has become a graveyard for children,” his comment underplays the fact that Palestinian children in Gaza are not just dying, they are being killed. More than just a graveyard, therefore, Gaza has become a slaughterhouse for children.
According to UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, children are “bearing the brunt” of Israel’s war. “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.” Save the Children UK insisted that, “We simply cannot accept the violence that Palestinian children continue to face as normal.”
And yet the infanticide in Gaza has been normalized.
International medics who have no political affiliation to Palestine but have gone to work in Gaza for purely humanitarian reasons, provide us with eyewitness accounts of Gaza post-7 October. Professor Nick Maynard is one such doctor. He worked in both Al-Aqsa Hospital and Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. “We saw a lot of children with their arms or legs blown off,” he told the Irish Times. “There were no painkillers to give the children.”
More than four hundred Palestinians were slaughtered by the Israeli attack on Al-Shifa Hospital when the occupation state claimed that the hospital was being used by Hamas. This claim was rejected unequivocally by Maynard. “I have never seen any evidence of Hamas there,” he insisted.
Firoze Sidhwa is a 42-year-old trauma and critical care surgeon at San Joaquin General Hospital in North California. He went with the World Health Organization to work at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. What Sidwha told Bruno Macaes of the New Statesman about the killing of children in Gaza is chilling: “Most of them have been killed in explosions where a lot of them would have been trapped under the rubble. Some are going to die immediately with a concrete block hitting their head or something like that but a lot of them just had their leg pinned under the rubble and because there is no heavy moving equipment, there is no way to get to them, they slowly died of sepsis while buried in the dark tomb alone, freezing during the night, boiling during the day. It would take three, four, five days for them to die in this way. It’s horrific to think of the scale of their suffering.” Horrific indeed.
Israel has been deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian children in Gaza. “We had kids shot in the chest and shot in the head, in other words clearly deliberate, clearly targeted,” explained Sidhwa. Another doctor from a different hospital in Gaza told him how often he encounters children being shot by Israelis: “All the time, every day, kids were coming in who had been shot in the head and chest.”
Sidhwa and other doctors who worked in Gaza’s hospitals penned a letter to the Biden administration to advocate an end to the infanticide in Gaza. The letter included the damning indictment that, “Every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.”
Despite such clear evidence of infanticide, the US continues to support Israel and provide it with more weapons to keep its baby-killing machine running. One wonders when the vampire-like thirst of Zionists like Ben Hamoo for the blood of Palestinian children will be satiated. “Israelis must ask themselves if they’re willing to live in a country that lives on blood,” wrote Gideon Levy in Haaretz on 15 September.
How many more babies in Gaza have to be killed before the US and Europe stops arming the baby killers in Tel Aviv and instead impose sanctions on the genocidal apartheid regime? How will we answer on that day when we all return and stand before our Creator, the Most Just, and are asked, “For what crime were the children of Gaza killed?” Whatever we think we might say then, we must act now to bring this infanticide inherent in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to an end.
-Iqbal Suleman is a social justice lawyer and former head of the law clinic for Lawyers for Human Rights in Pretoria. His article appeared in MEMO.
