Pat Taub
I feel like I’m living in an alternate reality where the mounting deaths, grave injuries and trauma experienced by Gaza’s children are barely reported. What makes headlines are soft stories like the Olympics, a largely substance-free Presidential campaign, the Ben Affleck-Jennifer Lopez drama while the nightmare in Gaza continues at an accelerated pace for its children.
Americans want feel-good stories. They don’t want news accounts that will leave them unsettled. In the early days of Israel’s 10-month genocidal assault on Gaza, images of children’s white-shrouded corpses or screaming toddlers being operated upon became too horrific to digest so the mainstream news stopped printing them or printed watered-down accounts.
One of the innumerable young children wounded by Israeli bombs (Al Jezeera)
One has to turn to social media reporters like Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate, and organizations like the Electronic Intifada for updated stories of the genocide that has killed, by conservative estimates, over 15.000 children. The number of wounded children is 12,000 or 70 every day.
The mounting deaths, grave injuries and trauma of Gaza’s children are on our hands. American-supplied bombs, paid for in part by our tax dollars, are responsible for Gaza’s dead and injured children. Professor John Mearsheimer insists that Israel could not have gone to war and carried it out without US weapons, citing that in 2024 alone the US has given Israel $18 billion in weapons. He makes the case that the genocide is as much an American enterprise as an Israeli one.
Dr. John Mearsheimer
Israel’s onslaught has accelerated to daily bombings of Israeli declared “safe zones” where children are being killed and burned alive at the highest rate since the war began.
A tented area declared safe by Israel and then bombed (Reuters)
Dr. Javid Abdelmoneim of Doctors without Borders describes encountering an eight-year-old girl with a twisted leg, with no family, lying in a trolley outside the emergency room. “She was left to die because the system couldn’t cope. In any other health system, she would have been saved.”
Abdelkarim, 10 is one of the many Gazan children forced into adult roles after the adults in their families were murdered. He spends hours everyday queuing for water and searching for food, often coming up empty-handed. To pay for his mother’s diabetic medicine, Abdelkarim runs errands for neighbors and then walks for hours to the nearest pharmacy, only able to afford a few days’ worth of his mother’s life-saving medicine.
Children and their families in Gaza endure ongoing displacments (Electronic Intifada)
Ghaza, 6 years old has been too traumatized by the ongoing bombing to sleep at night. She’s among the countless number of children in Gaza suffering from night terrors brought on by Israel’s nonstop onslaught. When evacuating with her family, Ghaza’s father was arrested at a checkpoint. She ran after him but was deterred when Israeli soldiers fired into the air. Like many Gazan children on the move, Ghaza’s hour long walks meant passing corpses all along the way.
Dr. Gabor Mate describes the children in Gaza as the “most traumatized in the world,” referring to the incalculable deaths and destruction they have witnessed, assuring that this trauma will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
We have a choice: We can look away or we can take a stand against Israel’s nonstop killing of children in Gaza. I was dumbstruck when I came upon, the testimony of Dr. Mark Perimuth, another returning doctor from Gaza, who described treating children with gunshot wounds to the chest and head. Our tax dollars are making possible Israel’s intentional targeting of children in Gaza.
Dr. Mark Perimuth
Living conditions in Gaza have deteriorated to the degree where waterborne and hygiene and sanitation related diseases are rife. And now polio, once eradicated in Gaza, presents itself as another potential annihilating blow.
Famine in Gaza is producing a spike in children’s deaths from starvation
To quote Peter Daou, former Presidential advisor:
“Gaza is one of the defining moral issues of our time. Either we accept children being massacred by the tens of thousands, or we don’t.”
