Gaza
Saw this in the news today from Comment in the Guardian ....
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Why children are the first casualties of war in Gaza
- Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
January 1: A wounded Palestinian child screams as she arrives to the Al-Shifa hospital after an Israeli air strikein Gaza City. Photograph: Fadi Adwan /Getty Images
In war, everyone dies: men, women, children, civilians and fighters, the innocent and the villains. Every death is ugly and sad. But the dead bodies of children drop us into a deep pit of shame and sadness: they make us angry,
vulnerable and hopeless.
As I am writing, 315 children have died in Gaza in the last 19 days. Most probably, more will have died by the time this is published. About a third of the dead and injured have been children.
The dead children in Gaza take me back two years, to Israel's last war, with Lebanon. Again, it was the children who were dying. I remember seeing seven children lying together on a filthy brown blanket - next to the bodies of their relatives and parents - after their house, in the village of Qana, was bombed by Israeli planes. They all had acquired the monochrome beige colour of the debris they had been buried under all night. They had a look of astonishment, agonised confusion, their lush lips twisted, their mouths stuffed with dirt. But they looked peaceful even in the ugliness of their death.
All dead children look alike, that's the thing - even those mangled and disfigured by a Baghdad car bomb. They look asleep, not dead, just asleep after a long night of bombing and shelling.
There is no mystery as to why so many die in these wars: there are lots of children in Gaza - half of the population are children - so when you start bombing residential areas, they die.
Walk in any alleyway, refugee camp or slum in the Middle East and you will see them in their dozens, alive, and annoying: screaming, shouting and running around; chasing each other between cars, legs and push carts; gathering around any scene, a car with a flat tyre, a street scuffle - or just happily engaged in stone throwing matches. When these streets are hit, those annoying children are the first to die.
The families will grieve - and they will never forget. Last week, the day when four rockets were fired from south Lebanon towards Israel, I saw a Lebanese woman with a white headscarf sitting on the edge of her son's grave, just under a kilometre from the Israeli border. The grave, made of marble, its edges painted in green, was fenced by few bushes of red roses still wet from the early morning rain. The woman's sunken eyes were filled with tears; she cried and talked to her son Ali in the grave. "I didn't see you when you died Ali, they took you to the hospital and buried you and I wasn't there, right Ali?" She wiped her face and the marble with tissues and cried more. "May Allah burn the hearts of those who killed you like they burned my heart."
"I cry for every dead son in the world," she told me.
"Everyone, even if he was a Jew. I don't want him to die. I am a mother and I know."
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**********************
Why children are the first casualties of war in Gaza
- Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
January 1: A wounded Palestinian child screams as she arrives to the Al-Shifa hospital after an Israeli air strikein Gaza City. Photograph: Fadi Adwan /Getty Images
In war, everyone dies: men, women, children, civilians and fighters, the innocent and the villains. Every death is ugly and sad. But the dead bodies of children drop us into a deep pit of shame and sadness: they make us angry,
vulnerable and hopeless.
As I am writing, 315 children have died in Gaza in the last 19 days. Most probably, more will have died by the time this is published. About a third of the dead and injured have been children.
The dead children in Gaza take me back two years, to Israel's last war, with Lebanon. Again, it was the children who were dying. I remember seeing seven children lying together on a filthy brown blanket - next to the bodies of their relatives and parents - after their house, in the village of Qana, was bombed by Israeli planes. They all had acquired the monochrome beige colour of the debris they had been buried under all night. They had a look of astonishment, agonised confusion, their lush lips twisted, their mouths stuffed with dirt. But they looked peaceful even in the ugliness of their death.
All dead children look alike, that's the thing - even those mangled and disfigured by a Baghdad car bomb. They look asleep, not dead, just asleep after a long night of bombing and shelling.
There is no mystery as to why so many die in these wars: there are lots of children in Gaza - half of the population are children - so when you start bombing residential areas, they die.
Walk in any alleyway, refugee camp or slum in the Middle East and you will see them in their dozens, alive, and annoying: screaming, shouting and running around; chasing each other between cars, legs and push carts; gathering around any scene, a car with a flat tyre, a street scuffle - or just happily engaged in stone throwing matches. When these streets are hit, those annoying children are the first to die.
The families will grieve - and they will never forget. Last week, the day when four rockets were fired from south Lebanon towards Israel, I saw a Lebanese woman with a white headscarf sitting on the edge of her son's grave, just under a kilometre from the Israeli border. The grave, made of marble, its edges painted in green, was fenced by few bushes of red roses still wet from the early morning rain. The woman's sunken eyes were filled with tears; she cried and talked to her son Ali in the grave. "I didn't see you when you died Ali, they took you to the hospital and buried you and I wasn't there, right Ali?" She wiped her face and the marble with tissues and cried more. "May Allah burn the hearts of those who killed you like they burned my heart."
"I cry for every dead son in the world," she told me.
"Everyone, even if he was a Jew. I don't want him to die. I am a mother and I know."
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posted by crystal | 4:51 PM
2 Comments:
The whole thing is soooooo depressing. Especially because of the children being slaughtered. I've been really down about this situation. It seems so endless and pointless - and it's impossible for the U.S. to act fairly. You'd think after 80 years of this crap, we'd try to find a halfway reasonable solution.
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