Why Israel wants to kill the children of Gaza
Palestinian children queue for hot food distributed by a charity kitchen at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, 15 July 2025
Linah Alsaafin writes in Middle East Eye on 17 July 2025:
The western-backed Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip has entered its deadliest phase, and the world continues to slumber on. This summer has marked an uptick in the daily killing of Palestinians – an average of 100 lives massacred each day, most of them already contending with the pangs of hunger amid a man-made mass starvation campaign.
The small coastal territory, blockaded by Egypt and Israel with the complicity of the international community, is now the most dangerous place in the world for children, who make up about half the population. As early as 31 October 2023, UNICEF described Gaza as “a graveyard for children, a living hell for everyone else”. This has been echoed by numerous UN officials, most recently last Friday by the UN refugee agency chief, Philippe Lazzarini, who warned of Israel’s “Machiavellian scheme to kill” in Gaza.
Missiles and shrapnel rip through the fragile bodies of children in open marketplaces, at water collection points, at aid distribution sites, and while waiting in line for nutritional supplements. Children are bombed inside displacement tents, burned alive in school shelters and buried beneath the rubble of their homes. Even before they are born, foetuses are blown from their mothers’ wombs by the force of bombs.
Last week, the decapitated body of eight-month-old foetus Saeed Samer al-Laqqa – documented in footage widely shared on social media – failed to register even a mention in mainstream media. His absence from the headlines is part of the institutional silence that has sustained Israel’s genocidal project for more than 21 months.
Even when their deaths are acknowledged, the children of Gaza are reduced to little more than casualty figures. But their killing has never been collateral damage: it is a deliberate effort to extinguish a future Israel fears: a generation of Palestinians born under siege, whose survival, memory, and innate human desire for freedom and dignity threaten the foundations of a settler-colonial state built on their erasure.
Prison to martyrdom
On 12 July, Youssef al-Zaq, barely 17 years old, was killed alongside his niece and nephew, Maria and Tamim, in an Israeli attack on their building in Gaza City. Youssef, once known as the youngest Palestinian hostage, was born in an Israeli prison in 2008. His mother, Fatema al-Zaq, was arrested in 2007 while attempting to cross into the occupied West Bank and, during the early stages of her captivity, learned she was two months pregnant. “The Israeli occupation tortured his mother so that she would miscarry,” Youssef’s cousin Ahmed Sahmoud told me. Fatema gave birth to a healthy baby boy, but her arms and legs were shackled during labour, and she received minimal medical care from Israeli prison guards.
Youssef spent the first 20 months of his life behind bars. In 2009, he and his mother, along with 19 other Palestinian female detainees, were released in exchange for a video showing Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit alive.