‘When is it legal to kill a child?’
Answer: when the child is Palestinian. As Graeme Wood writes in his Atlantic article: ‘It is possible to kill children legally if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them.’ Something we would never dare express if the lives of white or European children were brutally slain. The western media has exposed itself to be a bastion of colonial racism. Though many rightly took to social media to call out this utterly sickening remark, Graeme Wood brazenly expressed what both the US and Israel have repeatedly demonstrated through their actions: they simply do not care about the lives and humanity of Palestinians and their children.
This explains the barbaric treatment of Palestinians by Israeli forces and the appalling media reporting that has followed their plight. Since October 7th as Israel began to collectively punish Gaza’s population of 2 million, the UN secretary described Gaza as a ‘graveyard for children’ with at least 13000 Palestinian children killed. Over the past ten months 1.7 million Palestinian children have been forced from their homes, living in tents while experiencing forced starvation and ‘catastrophic hunger’ as Israel deliberately prevents the delivery of humanitarian aid. Several videos show Gazan children to be severely malnourished. Not to mention that Palestinian children have repeatedly witnessed the worst sorts of violence, humiliation, torture, and murder of their families and loved ones. As a result of 75 years of living under a brutal occupation, research carried out by Save the Children found that ‘80% of Palestinian children reported feeling in a perpetual state of fear, worry, sadness and grief.’
Yet despite international consensus that every child deserves to live a life, free from fear and violence, the rights of Palestinian children are seen as an exception. As Israel and the US continue to justify their crimes under the guise of self-defence Palestinian children are expected to live in utterly demeaning circumstances, where violence and genocide is the norm and where a child can be arrested for no reason at all. Meanwhile the western media does little to highlight the barbaric treatment that Palestinian children are forced to endure.
The extent of this colonial racism has been made clear in the massacres and air strikes that have occured in recent weeks. The Rafah massacre that occurred on the 26th of May, illustrated the double standard in western media coverage when Palestinians and their children are reported on. Despite the IDF carrying out a barbaric attack that left several Gazan children dead including baby Ahmad Al- Najar who was found decapitated, the massacre hardly made it to the front page.
Contrast this to the false claims of 40 Israeli beheaded babies, that occurred in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks, which then featured across much of the mainstream press. Eager for a sensationalist headline, the story was printed blindly and irresponsibly without any effort to confirm its validity. ‘Horror at Pure Evil beheading of Babies’ published the Daily Express, as the Times headlined its papers with ‘Hamas cut the throat of babies in Massacre’. Despite having seen no real evidence, President Biden would then go on to deliberately lie and use this disinformation while condemning the attacks claiming, ‘I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children’. Yet in the Rafah massacre, real images of a beheaded Palestinian child, of a camp set ablaze as civilians and children resided within them was seen by us all, as Palestinians shared their horror on social media. And while the beheading of 40 imaginary Israeli babies deserved the world’s sympathy and outrage, the images of a real Palestinian baby with a charred headless body did not.
The past nine months have made it brutally clear that the lives of Palestinian children do not matter nearly as much as European or Israeli children. In the early months of 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, commentators on mainstream news channels expressed their anguish at the suffering of European children with ‘blonde hair and blue eyes’ who were being killed by Russian forces. They expressed their shock that such a tragedy would occur in a ‘relatively civilised, relatively European city’.
As for Palestinian children, it does not matter if they are murdered, or witness the killing of their loved ones in-front of their eyes and are then consequently scarred with lifelong trauma. As is the case with 15-year-old Muhammad Mattar who was shot twice by the IDF as he watched them murder his younger brother during the Nuseirat massacre which Western politicians and media would then hail as a successful rescue mission. Or in the case of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old girl who was found dead in a car alongside her family, two weeks after pleading with rescuers to come and save her. Or the four- day- old twins Asser and Aysel, who were murdered in an Israeli airstrike alongside their mother and grandmother, as their father had left briefly to register their births.
Perhaps here lies the answer as to why a permanent ceasefire has yet to be achieved and why the murder of Palestinian children has been allowed to continue for so long. They are not European children and therefore they are not deserving of the same outrage or sympathy. As a result of such vile prejudice and racism, Palestinian children have paid a price that no child should ever be expected to pay. Forced to flee every day and watch their loved one be murdered in front of their very eyes, the world has stood by and done nothing. Everyday those in the halls of power repeatedly demonstrate how they do not care about the murder and genocide of Palestinian children. The invitation and applause that Prime Minister Netanyahu received in the US congress illustrated this.
As heartbreaking images of Palestinian children continue to surface on our screens, and many do their best to present it as ‘Hamas Propaganda’, what must be reiterated is that Palestinian children are just as deserving of growing up in freedom and dignity like children in the western world. They are not numbers or nameless faces but rather they are human beings who are denied the right to live and whose names and stories we must learn and always remember. Palestinian children deserve to live fully and freely without being abused, intimidated and murdered on the land they love and call home.