In the months immediately following Oct. 7, 2023, I hesitated to share photos with the faces of either Israeli or Palestinian children. I found it troubling to think that a child considered “cute” might elicit more empathy. I thought that most people could agree that taking babies and mothers hostage constitutes a war crime, as does using disproportionate military force that is sure to kill children asleep in their beds, burying them under the rubble. Every night at our family dinner table, we have prayed both for the Israeli hostages and their families and for the people of Gaza.
As time went on, U.S. support for Israel’s indiscriminate military assault on Gaza added to the dehumanization of Palestinians. President Biden could express care and concern for Israeli hostages, but to my mind, he never showed the same feelings toward the families of Palestinians killed in Gaza. So I would periodically share the stories of Palestinian children to help reclaim their innocence and their right to live—whether 6-year-old Hind Rajab, killed by the Israeli military along with her family and the paramedics trying to rescue her, or the newborn twin babies Asser and Ayssel Al-Qumsan, whose father discovered them dead from an airstrike in an apartment building in Gaza after he returned home from getting their birth certificates.
This past February brought more painful days for Israeli society and all people of good will when Hamas returned the bodies of the two Bibas children, 4-year-old Ariel and baby Kfir, to their families. (The remains of their mother, Shira, followed a few days later, after the body initially returned by Hamas was found not to match her DNA.) These two young souls add to the 38 Israeli children killed by Hamas on Oct. 7, and to the 18,000 Palestinian children killed by the Israeli military, with another 19,000 left orphaned, in the ensuing 15 months—and continuing anew with 170 more Palestinian children killed as a cease-fire unravels and Israel resumes its bombardment of Gaza.
Is it crass to compare numbers? Yes, because every life is precious and sacred in the eyes of God. Every loss of a child is the loss of a whole universe of memories—of learning to tie their shoes, of taking a first step, of the sound of their deepest giggle and the way their face looks at the crest of their first smile—and of the many expectations and hopes and worries that come with being a parent.
Still, it matters that more Palestinian women and children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than during the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades. They represent ever more universes that should have been saved, just as the Bibas family should have come home alive in a much earlier cease-fire deal and not had their coffins paraded by Hamas—in the same kind of cruelty displayed by Israeli settlers who rushed to the Gaza border to block food aid trucks for civilians and by far-right protesters who broke into an army base to support soldiers accused of abusing Palestinian prisoners.
There are Israelis and Palestinians who reject this kind of cruelty and inhumanity. There is even a group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian parents who have each lost a child in the violence, and they say they don’t want any new members, recently demanding on X “international intervention to stop Israel’s attacks and enforce going back to the ceasefire deal that was signed.” They give me hope that I wasn’t entirely wrong: It isn’t the cuteness, the nationality, the religion, the hair or skin color of a child that makes them innocent but rather just being a child. Whether Israeli or Palestinian, they have the right to safety, equality and dignity on the land where they have been born. They also have the right, when death comes, for their memories to be a blessing and not a reason for revenge.
