At least 724 Palestinian children have been killed in airstrikes over the past week. Approximately half of Gaza’s 2 million residents are children. Those include some half-million children given 24 hours to evacuate northern Gaza ahead of an anticipated Israeli attack on Gaza City.
This newsletter is briefer than a single child’s death in Israel or Palestine could merit. I’d planned to publish a different story today, and still intend to in a couple days. In those intervening days, more atrocities will surely come, carried out against children, and committed in children’s names.
The past week’s war began with the mass-killing of Israeli civilians young and old, and continues with the mass-killing of Palestinian civilians young and old. Each of those civilian deaths is an abomination, a world lost.
Still, in the days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, conversation about the war has revolved around children. Children killed and kidnapped, children without food or water, children forced to evacuate, children in crosshairs. False or misleading footage of children dead, children abducted have flooded the internet, supplanting genuine documentation of these horrors, as if social media cannot get enough of them. Reports of beheaded Israeli babies have been issued and rescinded and re-advanced. These children have been indisputably murdered, but the methods of the death—by blade or bullets—remain hotly litigated online, including by people who suggest that the precise method of Hamas brutality demands new degrees of retaliation, up to and including an absolute end of Palestinian existence.
I can understand why children have been placed at the forefront of these arguments. In a long and bitter conflict, shaped by histories and politics that most observers gingerly avoid, it’s tempting to frame the fight in terms of innocents. When each side accuses the other of war crimes, it’s harder to parse the particulars than it is to consider the guiltless victims.
The focus on children can even suggest empathy, a parallel suffering. Israeli and Palestinian children are equally innocent of grown-up wars, and their invocation can suggest an interchangeability, a mathematical constant of naivety.
And yet, as the war moves into its second week, the terms facing these children are not equal. Even rhetorically, the deck is stacked against Palestinian children, whom American commentators have described in such military terms as “non-combatants” or “human shields,” while Israeli politicians sweep them into statements of collective guilt.
In announcing the shutoff of food, water, electricity, and food to Gaza this week, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant justified the siege by stating that “we are fighting human animals.” Gallant’s defenders would argue that he was speaking specifically of Hamas. But the siege attached to his statement threatened to starve every child in Gaza. Hamas can impose no such blockade on Israel.
In remarks last week about protecting Palestinian civilians, Israeli President Isaac Herzog suggested that all Palestinians were culpable for Hamas’s attack, as civilians who oppose the group should have orchestrated a “coup” to overthrow them. “It’s an entire nation that is out there that’s responsible,” Herzog said. “It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.”
In this environment, I wonder at the disparity in how Israeli and Palestinian mothers can grieve their dead children and protect the living. An unknown number of Israeli children have been killed or abducted (the Israeli government hasn’t yet differentiated the death toll of approximately 1,300). I cannot begin to imagine those parents’ pain. Outside the family, however, this grief is metabolized differently in Israeli and Palestinian government and military apparatus. The killings of Israeli children have been used to provide justification for a military campaign against Gaza. The killings of Palestinian children—and they are many, even before this week’s war—are only allowed to inspire, at most, a restrained and apolitical mourning.
Righteous anger at the death of Israeli children is shared, distributed in international media, a collective grief suggesting a collective cause. And when that collective grief is mobilized militarily, it dashes against the collective guilt applied to all residents of Gaza, half of whom are children, their innocence an afterthought, or denied outright, or used to underscore the evil of Israel’s enemy—if Hamas is using children as human shields, they must be beyond reason.
This asymmetrical attack on young people is ongoing. As Israeli forces reportedly prepare for an attack on Hamas in Gaza City, some 1.1 million Gaza residents have been ordered to evacuate into south Gaza, where streets and hospitals are already overflowing. They have limited access to basic resources, functional roads, or fuel. Hospitals and human rights organizations have warned that such an exodus is impossible. Already an airstrike has hit a convoy of fleeing northern Gazans, killing 70, most of them women and children, the Guardian reported. A New York Times contributor in Gaza described fleeing for a border crossing with his three children, only for Israeli airstrikes to shut the crossing and send the family to a refugee camp.
And still American commentators—American senators!—have called for the complete destruction of Gaza. Senator Lindsay Graham called on Israel to “level” Gaza in order to “defend yourself.” Senator Marco Rubio, when reminded that half of Gaza’s 2 million residents are children, responded “yeah, I don't think there's any way Israel can be expected to co-exist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages,” going on to explain that Hamas had targeted Israeli children, and that it continues to use Palestinian civilians as “shields.”
“This is going to be incredibly painful,” Rubio said of Palestinian civilian deaths. “This is going to be incredibly difficult. And it's going to be horrifying, the price to pay.”
That passive voice, as if those horrors are natural and unavoidable, is cowardice. It is cowardice when other lawmakers, human rights organizations, and the United Nations call for ceasefires on children’s behalf.
But Rubio will not pay that price, borne by Israeli and Palestinian parents and their children who remain abstracted, as fodder for arguments and fodder for funerals.