"We had a 14-year-old girl just walk out of some war zone of Gaza City, stunned, mute, bloodied, and she absolutely had no one,” says James Elder, Unicef’s chief spokesperson, who spent weeks in Gaza under bombardment. “How many other children are like that right now? We simply don’t know.”
Israel has managed an incredible feat! They’ve managed to make Hamas look like the “good guys”.
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Since then, he has stayed with different family members, moving on when it was their neighbourhood’s turn to get bombed, eventually making his way to a cousin and his aunt in Rafah.
The numbers of Gaza’s dead, wounded and orphaned children are uncertain but there is no question they have borne the brunt of the war, launched after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people.
Another child, a 14-year-old boy called Kareem, recalled how his mother promised him she would make sure that the family stayed close under the relentless Israeli bombardment, so if the worst happened they would at least die together.
It was a promise she would break on 3 December when she and Kareem’s father were killed in the bombing of a relative’s house in the Sabra district of Gaza City.
Roa’a Alshafie, aged 13, had moved to southern Gaza with her mother, while her father stayed behind close to the family home in the north.
Her father died two days later in a blast at the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahiya in the north, leaving her two surviving brothers and two sisters as orphans, living with relatives in southern Gaza.
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Even the bluest and whitest Israeli apologist, convinced that the Israelis are the good guys in this conflict will – if they’re being honest – tell you: “Hamas started a war and is hiding behind these civilians as human shields, so this is what happens, do not expect us to stay our hand to prevent it, or to take responsibility for it, what if it was your country in this position, you would change your tune real quick”, etc etc etc. In essence, welcome to the real world, where this sort of thing can just happen and we do not have the ethical tools or framework to make it not happen. This is depressing as fuck.
A lot of Israelis imagine that in the aftermath of all of this Gaza will lose the capacity to launch another 7/10 and ‘learn its lesson’ which in itself will magically lead to a bright and peaceful future for the region. Somehow I am not so optimistic. Pragmatically speaking the Israelis themselves are in no position to say “now that we’ve bombed you, let us uplift you” but egads, someone should do something. The knowledge that even after Israel decides it has done enough and winds down its Gaza operation apparently no sane governing body wants to take responsibility for Gaza saddens me to no end. These people just deserved better, I don’t care how much they cheered for 7/10 or whatever. There can be no justice or peace without compassion