We cannot look away from the images of children killed in Gaza

A Palestinian girl killed in an Israeli strike on the Gaza Strip, May 2025

The Haaretz lead editorial on 7 May 2025:

We do not want to see the girl in this picture. If we see her, we will feel guilty. We do not want to feel guilty because October 7 happened to us, not them. And we are unwilling to let go of this feeling, even when we kill thousands of children in its name.

On Tuesday, the Israel Air Force killed nine children, between the ages of 3 and 14. Two airstrikes, a few hours apart, hit a school in al-Bureij refugee camp, in central Gaza, that sheltered displaced Palestinians. The Israeli military said that the target was a “Hamas command and control center” and that “steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming uninvolved civilians.” Whether or not such steps were taken, 32 Palestinians were killed in the strikes, including at least nine children and four women.

Social media was again filled with images and videos: the bodies of children; parents carrying their wounded children, others saying goodbye to their dead children. The images from which we avert our eyes, so as not to see what we have done. “They brought it upon themselves,” we say to ourselves, and go on justifying a war that had long since become an unchecked fit of vengeance.

Israelis can continue to avert their eyes from any documentation that brings them face-to-face with the sights of the killing in Gaza. The media can continue to be derelict in its duty and not expose Israelis to what is being done in its name and by means of its children.

We can continue to ignore the number of Palestinians in the Strip who have been killed – more than 52,000, including around 18,000 children; to question the credibility of the figures, to use all of the mechanisms of repression, denial, apathy, distancing, normalization and justification. None of this will change the bitter fact: Israel killed them. Our hands did this.

We must not avert our eyes. We must wake up and cry out loudly: Stop the war.

This article is reproduced in its entirety