The Unbelievable Stories About the Children of Gaza

in Palestine

by Vijay Prashad

04/07/2024

The story should not be real. It was the morning of January 29, 2024. 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 levelled a nearby high-rise, so the car had to go north before it could go south.

Not far down the road, the car came under fire from Israeli military vehicles, including Merkava tanks. According to a remarkable investigation by UK-based research agency Forensic Architecture, 355 bullets were fired into the car.

One of those in the car, a six-year-old child named Hind Rajab, called emergency workers. “They are dead,” she says 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.

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 say 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.

The murder of Hind Rajab and her family shocked the world (Hind Rajab’s father was killed 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 song in May called “Hind’s Hall.”

Everyday Violence

June 14: One child was killed by Israeli airstrikes in Zeitoun (Gaza City).

June 22: Two children were killed by Israeli airstrikes in Shujaiya (Gaza City).

June 25: Two children were killed by Israeli fire on al-Wahda Street, near Al-Shifa Hospital (Gaza City).

June 25: Three children were killed by Israeli airstrikes in the Maghazi refugee camp.

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) said 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.

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.

One or Two Legs

An Al Jazeera interactive website 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 said, “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.

A new report 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 said 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.”

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 reposted in many places.

These are the stories of Gaza.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Starvation is a War Crime: Notes From Israeli Genocide Against Palestinians

Speaking in Rome, Italy, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme, Cindy McCain, said: “If we do not exponentially increase the size of aid going into the northern areas” of Gaza, “famine is imminent. It’s imminent.”

Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the genocidal Israeli war, and the Palestinians in Gaza are on the verge of famine. Palestine’s Permanent Observer at the United Nations Riyad Mansour said that over half a million people are “one step away from famine.” “What it means for mothers and fathers to hear their babies and children cry of hunger day and night, no milk, no bread, nothing,” he added.

Indeed, babies and children already have begun to die due to the famine-like conditions in Gaza. With Ramadan already begun, the situation is not only physically acute, but also mentally torturous.

There are currently 2,000 medical workers who are trying their best to operate basic medical care in northern Gaza. They are working without access to any hospital facilities and often with no power or water, including very limited supplies of medicines. Now, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza has said that these workers are themselves in a dire situation.

The staff, said the Ministry, “will start Ramadan without Suhoor or Iftar meals.” “Doctors will die. The nurses there will die. And the world will witness the largest number of victims of hunger in the coming days,” said Ashraf al-Qudra, the ministry’s spokesperson.

War Crime

In June 1977, at a conference on humanitarian law in armed conflict, the member states of the United Nations extended the Geneva Conventions (1949) to add Protocol II. Article 14 of that protocol says that “[s]tarvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited.” The belligerent power is “prohibited to attack, destroy, remove, or render useless” any “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works.”

Two decades later, when the UN member states wrote up the Rome Statute (1998), they added in a section on starvation under the heading of war crimes (Article 8); “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies” is a war crime. The Rome Statute is the treaty that formed the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has thus far remained silent on its obligations to act on its own founding document.

On February 29, trucks with humanitarian aid came into the northern part of Gaza. When desperate people rushed to these trucks, Israeli soldiers fired on them and killed at least 118 unarmed civilians. This is now known as the Flour Massacre. In its aftermath, 10 UN experts released a strong statement, which noted, “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since October 8. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.”

The UN special rapporteur for food, Michael Fakhri, who signed that statement, later expanded this accusation against Israel. “Israel,” he told the UN Human Rights Council, “has mounted a starvation campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” These statements are very pointed. Words such as “intentionally” and phrases such as “starvation campaign” directly accuse Israel of war crimes based on Protocol II and the Rome Statute.

Fakhri focused on Gaza’s fishing industry, which had provided important food security for the 2.3 million Palestinians who live there. “Israeli forces,” he said, have “decimated the Port of Gaza, destroying every single fishing boat and shack. In Rafah, only two out of 40 boats are left. In Khan Younis, Israel destroyed approximately 75 small-scale fishing vessels.” This destruction, Fakhri said, has pushed Gaza “into hunger and starvation.” “In fact,” he added, “Israel has been strangling Gaza for 17 years through a blockade, which included denying and restricting small-scale fishers access to their territorial waters.”

At the UN General Assembly, Palestine’s Riyad Mansour said that Israel has bombed “every bakery and farm, destroying livestock and all means of food production.”

In the first month of the bombardment, Israel bombed the major bakeries of Gaza City. In November 2023, Abdelnasser al-Jarmi of the Bakery Owners Association in the Gaza Strip said that bakeries have not been able to function for lack of fuel and flour. As a consequence of the absence of bread, families have begun to gather a weed called khubaiza (or Malva parviflora) and to boil this as the main meal. “We are dying for a piece of bread,” said Fatima Shaheen as she built a meal for her two sons and their children in northern Gaza.

Crossings

Israel has refused to fully open the crossings into Gaza at Beit Hanoun and Karem Abu Salem as well as refused to allow complete opening of the Rafah crossing the links Gaza to Egypt. Since these land crossings are closed, and since Israel destroyed the Yasser Arafat International Airport in 2001, there are no easy solutions to bring food aid into Gaza. Delivery of food and supplies through the air is not sufficient—indeed it is a drop in the ocean (which is where some of the aid packages landed).

There is now talk of building maritime corridors, but since Israel has bombed the Port of Gaza this is not an easy option. That the US has said that it would build a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza’s southern half is ridiculous. It would be so much easier to open the Rafah crossing to allow at least 500 trucks a day into Gaza. But Israel will not permit this option.

International law is clear as daylight on the point of starvation as a war crime. There are no loopholes in Protocol II (1977) or in the Rome Statute (1998).

Friends in Gaza are finding this Ramadan month to be more difficult than any previously. Starvation is their general condition. But, unlike with other Ramadans, there is no early morning meal (Suhoor) and no late-night meal (Iftar). There is only the perennial noise of Israeli fighter jets mirrored by the groans of hunger in their bellies.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Source: This article was produced by Globetrotter.