It is estimated that around 21,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza, either buried under rubble or in mass graves, estranged from their families, detained or disappeared by Israel. The colonized are deprived of their voice, and the silence of colonized children is eerily loud, once the facts are made clear to distinguish the calamity of Israel’s macabre targeting of Palestinian civilians and the ensuing kill toll.
Save the Children has compiled a report that sets out the impact that Israel’s bombing of Gaza has had on children. With 43 per cent of the total casualties being children, and over 60 per cent of residential homes destroyed in Gaza, not only have some families been completely wiped out, but the likelihood of survival or reunification is also negligible. “Children aren’t likely to survive being crushed by entire apartment buildings,” the report states, while noting that children are “seven times more likely to die from blast injuries than adults due to their still developing and vulnerable bodies.” And yet, Israel’s narrative of “just” going after Hamas still prevails, even though it is clear that eliminating the younger generation of Palestinians seems to be a more pressing aim for the genocidal settler-colonial entity. Burnt, dismembered and disfigured Palestinian children have become normalized as they never should have been.
And for all the purported diplomatic shock at the discovery of mass graves in Palestine, the international community has still failed to step in.
This, even though, as the report states, “The spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights described bodies ‘buried deep in the ground and covered with waste’, and that some were bound and stripped of their clothes.” Nevertheless, the debate over genocide is still unfolding at bureaucratic pace, so that Israel is able to kill more Palestinian children, and the UN can issue more humanitarian warnings and shocking statistics.
Since 7 October, “over 17,000 children have been separated from their families, or orphaned,” says Save the Children. When the international community chastises Israel diplomatically, does it pay heed to the ramifications of such statistics on Palestinian society? In a densely populated, destroyed strip of land, with new piles of rubble forming every day from Israel’s “precision” bombs which target Palestinian civilians precisely, how does one articulate any meaning to family? Taking this even further, the UN should realize that not one of its Sustainable Development Goals can be reached in Gaza until its ceases all complicity with Israel and brings both the settler-colonial entity and itself to account for genocide.
Israel will have no response to these statistics, because it doesn’t respond to any call for accountability. It will continue disappearing Palestinian children, though, to ensure the destruction of future Palestinian generations. Genocidal planning shouldn’t be ignored, but the international community is showing us that it can be. Meanwhile, more images of burnt and dismembered children keep filling our screens while Israel gloats over its success with the “destroying Hamas” narrative which not a single Western government is willing to challenge. Hamas is an ideology born out of necessity, and as long as that necessity prevails, Hamas will exist. However, the children that Israel is killing under the pretext of “fighting Hamas” won’t be brought back, and that is exactly what Israel wants: the extermination of the indigenous population of Palestine by killing its future today.
-Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine, Chile and Latin America. Her article appeared in MEMO.
