Palestinian Children

Updated 2023-11-13

2023-11-10 Palestinian children are not “terrorists”    Israel and its advocates claim “there are no innocents in Gaza” and depict all Palestinians as legitimate targets. For them, to be alive in Gaza is to be implicated.   Israel’s war on Gaza has brutally blurred the distinctions between civilian and military objects, motives, and identities. Over the past four weeks, civilian spaces have made up much of the theater of war. Priority targets for air strikes in Gaza have included apartment blocks, hospitals, an ambulance convoy, communications infrastructure, a university, refugee camps, fishing boats, and schools. Following attacks by Hamas on civilians and military installations in the areas surrounding Gaza, the war has incurred over 10,000 Palestinian casualties in a month.

Indeed, at its most paranoid and inhumane, the conflation of civilians with Hamas casts some of Gaza’s most vulnerable citizens as terrorists. Children and infants are among the groups who most urgently need homes to live in, beds to sleep in, food to eat, water to drink, caregivers, and functioning communities to support their well-being. In the optic of counterinsurgency—an approach to combat that targets community support for clandestine fighters—children’s needs may indeed be seen, perversely, as aligned with the needs of combatants. Yet, in wartime, children and infants are also disparately vulnerable to injury, illness, and death. The international non-governmental organization Save the Children has reported that the child death toll in Gaza had, by October 29, exceeded the number of children killed in combat zones worldwide since 2019. In Belfast last weekend, hundreds of stuffed animals were left at the gate of the US Consulate to symbolize the Palestinian children who have been killed and to emphasize their status as innocents.  https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/palestinian-children-are-not-terrorists/

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