Childhood Erased: Israel’s War on Gaza’s Youngest

Emerging Issues

Childhood Erased: Israel’s War on Gaza’s Youngest

Nihal Karippur
Jul 28, 2025 - 22:51
Updated: Jul 28, 2025 - 23:25

Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip, backed by Western powers, has entered its deadliest phase, and the world remains largely indifferent. This summer, the daily death toll has soared, with around 100 Palestinians killed each day. Many of these victims are already weakened by famine, the result of a deliberate campaign of mass starvation. Israel backed by US with the silent support of the international community, have imposed a brutal blockade on this small coastal enclave. Gaza has now become the most dangerous place in the world for children, who make up nearly half of its population.

As early as October 31, 2023, UNICEF described Gaza as “a living hell for everyone else, a graveyard for children.” This grim reality has been echoed by multiple UN officials, including Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN refugee agency, who recently warned of Israel’s “Machiavellian scheme to kill” in Gaza.

Missiles and shrapnel rip through the bodies of children in open markets, at water points, at aid distribution centres, and even while waiting for nutritional supplements. Children are buried under the rubble of their homes, burned alive in school shelters, and blown apart inside displacement tents. Explosions are so violent that foetuses are torn from their mothers’ wombs before they ever see the light of day.

The decapitated body of eight-month-old foetus Saeed Samer al-Laqqa captured in footage widely circulated on social media last week, but received no mention in the mainstream media. His absence from headlines reflects the institutional silence that has enabled Israel’s genocidal campaign for over 21 months. In Gaza, children are reduced to mere casualty statistics, even when their deaths are acknowledged. But their killing has never been collateral damage; it is a calculated effort to extinguish a future that Israel fears: a generation of Palestinians born under siege, whose survival, memory, and innate yearning for freedom and dignity threaten the very 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 strike on their building in Gaza City. Once known as the youngest Palestinian detainee, Youssef was born in an Israeli prison in 2008. His mother, Fatema al-Zaq, had been detained in 2007 while attempting to cross into the occupied West Bank. During the early stages of her captivity, she discovered she was two months pregnant.

“The Israeli occupation tortured his mother to make her miscarry,” Youssef’s cousin, Ahmed Sahmoud, told me. Despite the abuse, Fatema gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Her limbs were shackled during labour, and she was given only the bare minimum of medical care by prison officers. 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 proving that Israeli captive Gilad Shalit was alive.

“There was a lot of attention on Youssef after he came home,” said Sahmoud, a journalist who escaped Gaza last year and now lives in Egypt. “The al-Zaq family called him the pride of the family. He was a quiet young man, deeply loved in his neighbourhood.” The youngest of eight siblings, Youssef longed to live fully and dreamed of travelling. But Sahmoud believes Israel deliberately targeted him: “Youssef’s birth and story exposed their oppression. That’s why they didn’t want him to live,” he said, pointing to Israel’s history of targeting and killing former Palestinian detainees. “The Israelis hated that Youssef, who was born in their captivity, was freed. He symbolised a kind of victory, a new beginning.”

“I can’t explain to you the special place Youssef held in the family,” Sahmoud added. “His martyrdom left a gaping void. The Zionist occupation army extinguished the family’s source of light.”

Dehumanising Children

Youssef’s story defines what childhood in Gaza looks like. He was born in a prison and spent most of his life in an open-air cage. He survived multiple Israeli assaults. He lived through nearly two years of genocide. He died hungry, sharing a single piece of bread with his niece and nephew. His body was pulled from the wreckage of their home.

For the past 21 months, death has become a constant presence. According to Gaza’s health ministry, over 17,000 children have been killed, a conservative figure that excludes the missing and the countless others still buried beneath the rubble. Even so, that number translates to an average of 30 children murdered by Israel every day since 7 October 2023, the equivalent of an entire classroom, or one child every 45 minutes.

How does one even begin to explain, let alone comprehend, Israel’s disproportionate and deliberate targeting of children? With its advanced weaponry, surveillance systems, and control over the population registry, these killings are not incidental, they are embedded in policy. From the earliest days of this genocide, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical story of Amalek to justify mass slaughter in Gaza, including the murder of children.

The killing and maiming of children, still a war crime under international law, has been legitimised and even encouraged by the statements of Zionist rabbis and Israeli government ministers. Through dehumanising language and fear-mongering, these figures openly call for the extermination of Palestinian children and “the women who produce terrorists.” They claim that “there are no innocents in Gaza,” and that every Palestinian infant is “already a terrorist from the moment of his birth.”

Israel has remained consistent in that logic. Since the settler colony’s establishment in 1948, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has never ceased. Genocide is no longer just an intention, it is a formalised strategy. “Thinning out” Gaza’s population is now a declared government policy.

Social Collapse

Why the children of Gaza? One million children represent a growing young adult population, a demographic reality that poses a challenge to an Israeli state that, deep down, knows it does not belong to the land it has soaked in Palestinian blood. Otherwise, why would it persist in violent subjugation and systematic murder? What kind of psyche boasts of killing children and regards it as a divine right? Who celebrates the massacre of innocents and sees their mere existence as a threat?

Targeting children serves another sinister objective: a calculated attack on the social reproduction of an indigenous society. The aim is to dismantle communal bonds and collapse societal structures. There is the fast genocide of missiles and bombs, and then the slow genocide—through malnutrition, mass incarceration, and the destruction of healthcare, creating a breeding ground for disease, with children being the most vulnerable. This engineered collapse is designed to extinguish the will to resist. In the resulting vacuum, colonial powers expand illegal settlements and plunder natural resources.

History offers parallels. During the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the British confined 1.5 million Kenyans in detention camps and tightly controlled villages marked by disease, malnutrition, torture, rape, and murder. “Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million was the mission reinstated,” wrote Harvard historian Caroline Elkins.

In Algeria, too, in response to anti-colonial resistance led by the FLN, the French forcibly rounded up thousands of peasants at gunpoint and relocated them into fortified settlements called sites de regroupement. The goal was to cut off rural support for the FLN by isolating communities, controlling movement, and restricting access to resources. By the end of the Algerian War in 1962, nearly two million Algerians had been confined in these settlements, suffering under disease, malnutrition, and state violence.

Future Freedom Fighters

From the British to the French to the Israelis, settler-colonial tactics have followed the same merciless logic, even as their scope and brutality have evolved. Across time and geography, the settler-colonial project has relied not only on physical domination, but also on the erasure of identity, the fragmentation of community, and the suppression of future resistance.

Again, I ask: why the targeting the children of Gaza?

Because they represent precisely that future, one rooted in knowledge and historical memory. In a society with one of the highest literacy rates in the region, despite decades of siege and bombardment, educated adolescents are not just symbols of endurance; they are agents of liberation. To a violent colonising power, a child with a book, a dream, or a memory is more threatening than any weapon.

Targeting minors, then, is not collateral damage; it is a strategy. A calculated part of a broader campaign to extinguish hope, overwrite the future, and uphold the machinery of occupation through terror and erasure.

About the author:

Muhammed Nihal K is a third-year undergraduate student in the Department of Civilizational Studies at Sabeelul Hidaya Islamic College, Parappur, Kerala, India. He hails from Karippur, Malappuram.

References

Al Jazeera. “Gaza: A Graveyard for Children – UNICEF Chief.” Al Jazeera, 31 Oct. 2023.
Human Rights Watch. “Israel: Apparent War Crimes in Gaza.” HRW, 15 Oct. 2023.
Lazzarini, Philippe. “The Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza: Statement to the United Nations.” UNRWA, 12 July 2024.
Middle East Eye. “Youssef al-Zaq: Palestinian Teen Born in Israeli Prison Killed in Gaza Strike.” Middle East Eye, 13 July 2024.
Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications, 2006.
UN News. “Gaza Is a Living Hell for Children, UNICEF Warns.” United Nations, 31 Oct. 2023.
UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. Henry Holt and Co., 2005.