The Wild Reed: “A Year of War Against Children”

Unfathomably, it’s been a year since a horrific Hamas assault set off a more horrific Israeli genocide in which an insatiable, unraveling Zionist project has slaughtered, burned, starved, maimed and broken hundreds of thousands, mostly women and children, in the ungodly name of vengeance. A year of blood, terror, protests, rulings, another self-immolation, ceaseless dead babies, doctors, teachers, poets. Yet still, “The word ‘ceasefire’ is a wish, a dream.” And in Gaza, “Every day, we live in hell.”

The official death toll in Gaza is now almost 42,000; doctors who have volunteered there say the true toll is at least 118,908, or almost triple that. There are over 97,000 wounded, and most of Gaza’s two million people are homeless. Given the ongoing violence, the tens of thousands missing, the unprecedented humanitarian crisis – famine looming, illness spreading, meager food, water, medical care – those obscene numbers will likely continue to soar. Meanwhile, Israel’s unhinged genocidal campaign has failed to achieve its mythical “total victory” over Hamas while successively obliterating one red line of “civilized” warfare after another – bombing schools, hospitals, mosques, shelters, using starvation as a weapon, killing hundreds of civilians to rescue four captives, targeting journalists and doctors, and so heedlessly, relentlessly bombing residential areas that entire families, babies to grandparents, have been wiped out. Still, complicit Western allies, mostly us, send killing weapons and look away.

The result: “A year of war against children that has made Palestine the most precarious place in the world to be a child.” Duly sacrificed on the altar of Israeli impunity are over 16,700 children killed, including newborns; at least 30,000 wounded, some as young as two with multiple limbs amputated; and many thousands of already disabled children seeing their fragile worlds implode: “They destroyed what was inside us.” In an angry letter to Biden urging, “End this madness now!,” ninety-nine U.S. doctors who worked in Gaza describe healthy newborns dying of malnutrition, the “first time I held a baby’s brain in my hand – the first of many,” children regularly shot in the head or chest despite international rules deeming them innocents, and, in their dreams, the cries and screams of maimed children and grieving mothers “our consciences will not let us forget. . . . Their mutilated bodies are a monument to cruelty.”

. . . And now Lebanon, where Israel burrows ever deeper into another quagmire without end or strategy, another place of dust, screams, sirens, rubble, bodies in pieces, nowhere to go. “We are all the same,” writes Mohammed Mhawish of “a solidarity beyond words.”

“For the people of Lebanon,” continues Mhawish, “Gaza is not a distant cause; it is a mirror of their own suffering, a continuation of the story we’ve been living for decades. We know the bombs killing their children are the same ones killing ours.”

On the mournful one-year marker, that sense of oneness prompted tens of thousands worldwide to protest, and fight to end, the ongoing genocide. In the U.S., the focus was rightly on our persistent, unconscionable, American-taxpayer-funded arming of Israel despite its routinely revealed war crimes, and irregardless of Biden Administration claims it’s been “working tirelessly” on a ceasefire. Critics: “That is not a thing.” The brutal, bottom-line truth: Without U.S. arms, funds and diplomatic cover, “This genocide would not have been possible.”

– Abby Zimet
Excerpted from “A Monument to Cruelty”
Common Dreams
October 7, 2024

The Wild Reed

Monday, October 07, 2024

“A Year of War Against Children”

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