The western-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip has entered its deadliest phase, and the world continues to slumber on.
This summer has marked an uptick in the daily killing of Palestinians – an average of 100 lives massacred each day, most of them already contending with the pangs of hunger amid a man-made mass starvation campaign.
The small coastal territory, blockaded by Egypt and Israel with the complicity of the international community, is now the most dangerous place in the world for children, who make up about half the population.
As early as 31 October 2023, Unicef described Gaza as “a graveyard for children, a living hell for everyone else”. This has been echoed by numerous UN officials, most recently last Friday by the UN refugee agency chief, Philippe Lazzarini, who warned of Israel’s “Machiavellian scheme to kill” in Gaza.
Missiles and shrapnel rip through the fragile bodies of children in open marketplaces, at water collection points, at aid distribution sites, and while waiting in line for nutritional supplements.
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Children are bombed inside displacement tents, burned alive in school shelters and buried beneath the rubble of their homes. Even before they are born, foetuses are blown from their mothers’ wombs by the force of bombs.
Last week, the decapitated body of eight-month-old foetus Saeed Samer al-Laqqa – documented in footage widely shared on social media – failed to register even a mention in mainstream media.
His absence from the headlines is part of the institutional silence that has sustained Israel’s genocidal project for more than 21 months.
Even when their deaths are acknowledged, the children of Gaza are reduced to little more than casualty figures.
But their killing has never been collateral damage: it is a deliberate effort to extinguish a future Israel fears: a generation of Palestinians born under siege, whose survival, memory, and innate human desire for freedom and dignity threaten the foundations of a settler-colonial state built on their erasure.
Prison to martyrdom
On 12 July, Youssef al-Zaq, barely 17 years old, was killed alongside his niece and nephew, Maria and Tamim, in an Israeli attack on their building in Gaza City.
Youssef, once known as the youngest Palestinian hostage, was born in an Israeli prison in 2008.
‘Youssef’s birth and story exposed the occupation. That’s why they didn’t want him to stay alive’
– Ahmed Sahmoud, Youssef’s cousin
His mother, Fatema al-Zaq, was arrested in 2007 while attempting to cross into the occupied West Bank and, during the early stages of her captivity, learned she was two months pregnant.
“The Israeli occupation tortured his mother so that she would miscarry,” Youssef’s cousin Ahmed Sahmoud told me.
Fatema gave birth to a healthy baby boy, but her arms and legs were shackled during labour, and she received minimal medical care from Israeli prison guards.
Youssef spent the first 20 months of his life behind bars. In 2009, he and his mother, along with 19 other Palestinian female detainees, were released in exchange for a video showing Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit alive.
“There was a lot of attention on Youssef after he came home,” said Sahmoud, a journalist who escaped Gaza last year and now lives in Egypt.
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“The al-Zaq family called him the flower of the family. He was a quiet boy, and very much loved in his neighbourhood,” he added.
The youngest of eight siblings, Youssef was determined to live a full life and longed to travel.
But Sahmoud said the family believes Youssef was deliberately targeted by Israel: “Youssef’s birth and story exposed the occupation. That’s why they didn’t want him to stay alive,” his cousin said, citing Israel’s history of targeting and killing former Palestinian detainees.
“The Israelis resented the fact that Youssef, who was born in their prison, was released. He represented a victory over them, a new lease of life.
“I can’t explain to you the special place Youssef held in the family,” Sahmoud said. “His martyrdom left a massive hole. The Zionist occupation army snuffed out the family’s source of light.”
Dehumanising children
Youssef’s story should not be the quintessential tale of childhood in Gaza. He was born in a prison and lived the rest of his life in an open-air cage.
He witnessed multiple Israeli assaults. He lived through nearly two years of genocide. He died hungry, sharing a single piece of bread with his niece and nephew. He was pulled from the rubble of his home.
Death has become a grim constant over the past 21 months. More than 17,000 children have been killed, according to the Gaza health ministry – a severe undercount that excludes the missing and the untold thousands still buried under rubble.
Even so, that number means an average of 30 children have been killed by Israel every day since 7 October 2023 – equivalent to one classroom, or one child every 45 minutes.
How does one begin to explain, let alone comprehend, Israel’s disproportionate and deliberate targeting of children?
With its advanced weaponry, surveillance and control over the population registry, these killings are not accidental – they are codified into policy.
From the earliest days of this genocide, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical story of Amalek to justify mass killing in Gaza, including children.
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The killing and maiming of children – still a war crime under international law – has been given full legitimacy, and even encouragement, through the rulings of Zionist rabbis and the rhetoric of Israeli government ministers.
With such dehumanising language and fear of the other, these figures openly call for the extermination of Palestinian children and “the women who produce terrorists”.
They proclaim that “there are no innocents in Gaza”, that every Palestinian child is “already a terrorist from the moment of his birth”.
To that end, Israel has been consistent. Since the settler colony’s founding in 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has never stopped. Genocide is no longer just an intention; it is official strategy. “Thinning out” Gaza’s population is now formal government policy.
Social collapse
Why the children of Gaza? One million children in Gaza represent a growing youth population – a demographic challenge to an Israeli society that knows, deep down, it does not belong to a land it has drenched in Palestinian blood.
Otherwise, why would it persist in violent subjugation and state murder? What kind of twisted psyche boasts of killing children and sees it as a divine right? Who celebrates the murder of innocents and sees their existence as a threat?
Targeting children serves another nefarious purpose: a calculated assault on the social reproduction of an indigenous society.
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The goal is to collapse communal bonds and societal structures. There is the fast genocide of bombs and missiles, and the slow genocide of starvation, mass internment, and the decimation of healthcare – creating a petri dish of disease where children are the most vulnerable.
From this chaos – designed to break the spirit of liberation and justice – colonial powers exploit the vacuum to expand illegal settlements and plunder natural resources.
During the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the British confined 1.5 million Kenyans in detention camps and tightly controlled villages rife with disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.
“Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated,” Harvard historian Caroline Elkins wrote.
In Algeria, too, in response to anti-colonial resistance from the FLN, the French forcibly rounded up thousands of peasants at gunpoint and relocated them to guarded settlements known as camps de regroupement.
The aim was to drain public support from the FLN by isolating the rural population, controlling their movements, and restricting access to resources.
By the end of the Algerian War in 1962, some two million Algerians were confined to these camps, suffering from disease and malnutrition.
Future freedom fighters
From the British to the French to the Israelis, settler-colonial tactics have followed the same brutal logic – even as their scale and cruelty have evolved.
Across time and geography, the settler-colonial project has relied not only on physical conquest but also on the erasure of identity, the fragmentation of community, and the suppression of future resistance.
To a violent colonising power, a child with a book, a dream, or a memory is more dangerous than any weapon
Again I ask: why the children of Gaza?
They represent exactly that future – one rooted in knowledge and historical memory.
In a society with one of the highest literacy rates in the region, despite decades of siege and bombardment, educated youth are not only symbols of survival; they are agents of liberation.
To a violent colonising power, a child with a book, a dream, or a memory is more dangerous than any weapon.
Targeting children, then, is not collateral damage. It is strategy. It is part of a broader campaign to destroy hope, overwrite the future, and maintain the machinery of occupation through fear and erasure.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
