Abby Zimet: No One Cares We Grieve When We Bury Our Children

No words. Of over 600 Palestinians killed this week in savage new US-funded Israeli bombings, officials say over 40% were children in the bloodiest few days of a bloody campaign Israeli leaders call “only the beginning.” Amidst gruesome wounds and grieving parents’ luminous images of babies now gone, one desperate father who saved his five children from their bombed home bewailed, “I brought them out to what? A life where we run from one death to another.”

Despite Israel’s persistent pretense it’s targeting Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters, this week’s bloodshed saw the most lethal day for Gazan children on record, with over 200 children killed Tuesday in a few vicious hours of air strikes. Overall, since Israel broke the ceasefire agreement, children and women have made up two-thirds of the dead, as well as the over 900 wounded. They join a still-vastly-incomplete list of 61,700 confirmed dead – one in every 50 Gazans – and 112,719 wounded, one in every 20.With strikes deliberately timed to kill the most victims – in the middle of the night – they caught many women and children sleeping, and social media is full of people mourning and memorializing their dead children. At one site , rescue teams pulled just two infants still alive from a bombed building where they found over 170 dead children, and 80 women. Having seen too many “attacks like this,” aid officials bitterly dismiss Israeli claims of protecting civilians with, “Look at the evidence.” Despite IDF lies, says one, “Eighteen thousand dead children (since 2023) tells me this is a war on children.”

Also, again deliberately, a war against families. With the help of its deadly, deeply flawed Lavender IA program, the IDF has established a “mass assassination program of unprecedented size, blending algorithmic targeting with a high tolerance for bystander deaths.” Its premise: Why target one Hamas fighter when you can kill their whole family? Data shows the current assault has entirely wiped out 902 extended families, some with dozens of members; at least 1,364 families have only one survivor, and 3,472 have two. This week, the brutal trend continued. A strike on a tent in southern Gaza  killed five siblings and their mother: Mohammed, Tareq, Lana, Aya, Wateen and Hadee Al-Humaida. Another killed all 30 members of Muntaser Qreiqeh’s family; gesturing to their bodies, he said, “These are the (ceasefire) negotiations.” Ramy Abdu’s sister, her children and the rest of her family all died in a strike on their home in Gaza City. “Israel may kill us at will, burn us alive, and tear us apart,” said Abdu, head of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “but it will never succeed in uprooting us from our land.”

Lest we forget, the carnage has descended onto an already decimated medical infrastructure of ravaged hospitals, meager or non-existent supplies, and surviving, overwhelmed health workers, almost all of whom have, while on duty, seen loved ones arrive dead or grievously wounded in the E.R’s. of their gutted hospitals. This week, they recounted more horrors: “We received many bodies and body parts, most of them children and women…many burned head to toe (with) limbs and heads missing.” Seven girls were getting their legs amputated, without anesthesia or sedation: “The screams were everywhere.” Doctors collapsing, crying, “the smell of burnt flesh in their noses.” A 29 year-old woman with hideous wounds – sacrum, rectum, bladder, colon – who died; she was the sister of a doctor. A six-year-old child with shrapnel wounds in his chest and abdomen, two holes in his heart, a laceration in his left lung, a liver split in half, two holes in his colon, three holes in his stomach, five holes in his small bowel. Reported one doctor, “He did not survive.”

Many more Palestinians, of course, never make it to the hospital. In “Scenes from a Ramadan Massacre,” survivors describe running from a blast to find half a woman’s body, dismembered corpses scattered in the street, the smell of blood and decaying flesh. Neighbors gather up the body parts into plastic bags and spend hours guarding the bodies, throwing stones at hungry stray dogs drawn by the rank smell until a single ambulance arrives. They only have space for the wounded; they refuse to take the dead. Meanwhile, even those improbably spared by the bombs are starving, or close to it, with Israel’s blockade the last few weeks preventing access to or deliveries of food, fuel, electricity, and water that Israel already long used as a weapon of war. Beleaguered aid groups say they made gains in helping survivors during the ceasefire, but those gains have been wiped out; today, Gazans are left feeling “terrified, helpless and devastated.” And despite leaflets dropped by a cruelly disingenuous IDF urging evacuation, there is truly, north or south, even braving bombardment overhead, “Nowhere safe to go.”

But Tuesday night, amidst non-stop shelling near their home outside Khan Younis, brothers Muhammad and Ibrahim Hamidi thought it would be safer to flee and take their families to Mawasi, the nearby coastal area that during the war Israel deemed a “safe zone.” In the middle of the night, after setting up their tents, Muhammad awoke to bombing. Running to Ibrahim’s tent, he found his brother lying on the ground covered in blood from a missile hit to his head; his daughter lay nearby, also wounded; his pregnant wife cradled their one-year-old son, both of them engulfed in flames; their three-year-old-son lay wounded in the head and back, in his last moments helplessly watching as his mother and baby brother burned alive. In the later telling, Muhammad didn’t know if his brother or niece survived. He only knew that Ibrahim, who had no political affiliation, worked during the war selling felafel to feed his family after his workplace was destroyed, and, “These are the targets of the Israeli ‘Defense’ Forces: A father selling falafel with three children, their mother, and her unborn child.”

Last year, tens of thousands of deaths ago, Gaza’s Ministry of Health published a 649-page list containing the names of what were then 34,344 Palestinians known to have been killed by Israel. On the House floor, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, America’s lone Congressperson of Palestinian descent, entered the names into the Congressional Record in defiant response to her colleagues’ thunderous silence in the face of the U.S.-backed slaughter – and to the hateful rhetoric of Israelis like a lawmaker who declared amidst the bloodbath, “The children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves.” Citing the first 14 pages, all dedicated to the deaths of infants under one, Tlaib called the list “one of the most documented horrific crimes against humanity in our history.” Then she mused whether Congress was silent “because these babies are Palestinian,” angrily reminding her colleagues that “Palestinians are also human beings.” “Fourteen pages of babies’ names. That’s 710 babies the Israeli government has murdered,” she said of what is more than ever an ungodly truth. “This is not self-defense. This is genocide.” 

Today, survivors in Gaza say they are “trying to hold on to life,” but it is “no longer what we once knew.” “We are good people :with deep feelings,” said one. “We grieve when we bury our children, and we try to understand how death has become ordinary.” On Friday, Israel blew up what remained of Gaza’s only cancer hospital, Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, which treated 10,000 patients a year. The same day, rescue workers pulled a 25-day-old girl alive from the rubble of a blast that killed the rest of her family; said a worker who heard her cries, “Thank God she is safe.” And Rasha Abu Jalal described surviving an airstrike with her family: “Suddenly, the screams of my five children pierced my ears. I couldn’t tell whether we were alive or dead and buried under the rubble.” They run outside, “not knowing if we were escaping death or racing toward it.” “When will this nightmare end?” she asks her husband; his reply, “We are alone in this world. No one cares.” And still, “fear follows us everywhere.” “We survived this airstrike,” she says in shock and sorrow, “but did we really survive this war?”

A few of the hundreds of Palestinian children killed this week by Israel. Montage of images posted by families on social media

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First published in Common Dreams. Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Abby Zimet has written CD’s Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women’s, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues.