The massacre of Gaza’s children: A stain on humanity

There are moments in history that burn into the conscience of humanity—so steeped in injustice that to look away is to become complicit. Gaza is one such moment. As we scroll through our screens on social media, the hollow eyes of wounded children in Gaza stare back at us. And the question that haunts me most is this: what are we becoming as a society if we let this genocide continue? Why aren’t world leaders doing more to put an end to this? 

I was raised to believe that children are a collective responsibility — delicate lives we must safeguard, no matter the borders, religion, or politics. Yet with each passing day and every child lost in Gaza, it is agonising to witness this tragedy unfold, knowing we remain powerless to physically stop it. 

Limbs poking through rubble, the newborns swaddled in hospital beds with no electricity—but how easily they appear on our screens. A child, burned and screaming, scrolls by just before an ad. Among these images is footage of six-year-old Ward Jalal Al-Shaikh Khalil, seen fleeing a burning school in Gaza City after an airstrike reduced it to an inferno. Her tiny frame is engulfed in smoke and chaos, her eyes wide with a fear no child should ever know. 

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Watching her silhouette go through the ruins of what was meant to be a place of safety, one feels the unbearable weight of a world that has failed her. Ward’s story should be front-page news, not a fleeting video buried between social media posts. She is not an abstraction— she is a little girl whose life was nearly stolen by a war she cannot understand. That she survived that moment is a miracle. That she had to endure it at all is an unforgivable tragedy.

Today, Gaza’s medical professionals face trauma, but on an unimaginable scale. They perform surgeries without anaesthesia, deliver babies in the dark, and are forced to triage life and death by candlelight. Aid workers and parents, too, live through this agony—hearing the cries of children they cannot feed, hold, or save. Just last week the UN said that 14,000 babies could die in Gaza within just 48 hours if Israel did not lift aid blockade. Now children are being killed on mass and burnt alive and entire families wiped out.

What does it do to the rest of us—watching, screaming into a digital void, and seeing no change? The images don’t fade from memory. They carve themselves into our daily lives. I have cried, overwhelmed by the cruelty of knowing that a mother, miles across a border, has no food to offer hers. 

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This widespread exposure is altering something deep in our societal psyche. For many, it is leading to a profound loss of faith in governments and in many media outlets. There was once a consensus that children should never be victims of war. That seems shattered when it comes to the children of Palestine and this is a stain on humanity. 

The worst part is the fear that this outrage is being dulled by repetition. That we are being conditioned into apathy. That the scale of this tragedy—more than 15,600 Palestinian children have been  killed according to UNICEF to date —is becoming just another statistic. Politicians may hope that this moral exhaustion will mute our protests. But it will not and we will continue to speak out. 

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, recently said:

“I’ve seen the silhouettes of so many people—so many children—burning alive, that I can’t look at fire anymore without feeling sick to my stomach.”

This is a war on children, and those of us with the privilege of peace cannot ignore it. Compassion should not be conditional. If we only care when the victims look like our own children, then our values are not universal—they are tribal.

And yet, I believe we can still choose a different path.

Every voice, every step taken in protest is an act of resistance against the narrative that their lives matter less. We may feel small, but together we can amplify what Gaza’s children cannot say for themselves: We are here. We see you. We will not forget. Ever. 

We owe them that much, at the very least.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.