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On Sunday, an Israeli strike killed six Palestinian children – and four adults – as they queued for water in a refugee camp. The deaths of children may be the most terrible part of any war. It is not only the suffering of the innocent and powerless, and the unimaginable pain of surviving parents – as dreadful as those are – but the knowledge of lives ended when they had barely begun, of futures that should have stretched long into the distance severed in an instant.
As shocking as Sunday’s deaths were, they are commonplace in Gaza: a classroom-worth of children have been killed each day since the war began. What marked them out was that so many deaths happened at once and publicly; and that Israel’s military felt obliged to acknowledge its responsibility – though without any great contrition. It claimed that a “technical error with the munition” caused it to miss its intended target and added that it “regrets any harm to uninvolved civilians”.
What does this bloodless, bureaucratic language have to do with the bloody deaths of six already traumatised children? These deaths were not a mistake. They were a tragedy – like those of the 10 children killed days before, as they queued outside a clinic. The Israeli military said, again, that it regretted any harm to civilians. And yet the bodies of children pile up. Children killed as they sheltered in former schools; children killed as they fled Israeli forces; children killed as they slept at home.
Gaza’s ministry of health says that more than 17,000 of the 58,000 Palestinians killed are children. Israel says that it seeks to minimise harm to civilians. The death toll belies that and Israeli intelligence sources told reporters last year that at times they were permitted to kill up to 20 civilians to take out even junior militants – with the preference being to attack targets when they were at home, because it was easier.
Those six thirsty children should not have needed to queue for water due to what the UN calls a human-made drought. Human Rights Watch believes that thousands of Palestinians have died due to Israel’s deliberate pattern of actions to deprive them of water, which it alleges amounts to the crime against humanity of extermination as well as acts of genocide. Those 10 hungry children should not have required nutritional supplements, but Israel continues to choke off aid and civilians are starving. Unrwa says that a tenth of the children screened in their clinics are malnourished.
Tens of thousands of children have been seriously injured; many are amputees. As of February last year, around 17,000 had been identified as unaccompanied or separated from their families. The very young are among those least able to cope with hunger and disease. How many will survive this conflict? How many will be able to remain in Gaza? How many will be able to live anything like a normal life one day? How many will see only vengeance or despair ahead of them?
Meanwhile, Israeli parents call for the hostage release and ceasefire deal that must end this conflict, and which Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted. Allies, including the EU and Britain, remain complicit in this war. They should ask themselves what they would do if their children faced for even one day what those in Gaza have endured for month after month.
The children of Gaza have the same rights as children anywhere – to water, to food, to shelter, to education, to play, to hope, to joy. To life. Yet on Sunday, Israel killed Abdullah Yasser Ahmed, Badr al-Din Qarman, Siraj Khaled Ibrahim, Ibrahim Ashraf Abu Urayban, Karam Ashraf al-Ghussein and Lana Ashraf al-Ghussein.
They were children. They were loved.
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