MON 20 NOV

It is International Childrens Day. A day commemorating the Declaration of the Rights of the Child by the UN General Assembly on 20 November 1959 and the 1989 UN General Assembly adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Children make their way to school chatting on the street outside but the children of Gaza ‘already dream of dying’ (Audre Lorde) and die in their thousands. They are not even granted the status and innocence of being ‘child’ as language labels them ‘minors’ ‘teenage males’ ‘under 18s.’

Meanwhile Israeli state TV screens a propaganda song of children singing a song of annihilation. Deeply embedded dehumanisation infecting our media and souls.  Bearing numb witness to videos of little girls and boys laughing and playing only to be told that they are now dead. Murdered with their entire family.

According to UN tallies of verified child deaths in armed conflict more children have been killed in Gaza since the October 2023 Israeli assault began than in all the world’s conflict zones combined, including Ukraine, over the last year. The average age of the thousands of Palestinians massacred in the last month is 5 years old. On Sky news Israel opposition leader Yair Lapid says ‘good riddance’ to those killed in Gaza. Terrorists. Terrorist Sympathisers. Human Shields.

And this is not new. In 2014 Palestinian poet and playwright Khaled Juma wrote ‘The Rascal’s of Gaza’ during ‘Operation Protective Edge”:

‘Oh rascal children of Gaza

You who constantly disturbed me

With your screams under my window.

You who filled every morning

With rush and chaos.

You who broke my vase

And stole the lonely flower on my balcony.

Come back,

And scream as you want

And break all the vases

Steal all the flowers.

Come back.

Just come back….