Tragedy of children in Gaza: Growing old under the Israeli bombs

Before any law was written, and before humanity preserved its long history of values, commandments, and ethical principles concerning children, there existed a fundamental and self-evident right: that a child should live.

That a child should open their eyes to a normal, ordinary life -- not to the sounds of bombs, explosions, displacement, and the fear of simply existing.

That a child should sleep in their mother's embrace, in their family home, their childhood and innocence intact.

That is the right that comes to mind on Palestinian Children's Day, marked on April 5. Because speaking of other rights becomes a deferred luxury when the right to life itself is under threat.

- Not a deficit of rights, but a collapse of meaning

The Palestinian child faces not so much a deficit of rights but a collapse in the meaning of life itself.

Their life is not a passing, exceptional story of pain. It is an ongoing tragedy of fear, terror, and the loss of safety -- a tragedy that reached its peak in the ongoing war of extermination, waged for years now in Gaza, and later extended to the West Bank.

Our humanity is measured by our ability to feel for these children.

Not through breaking headlines, nor through images that flash briefly across screens and then vanish. The news has a short memory, quickly replaced by other events. But pain has a long, deep memory -- one that evening bulletins and their shifting headlines cannot erase. Behind every number announced, there is a child with a name, a voice, and a small dream that was waiting to grow.

- A war that became a way of life

In Gaza, war is no longer an exceptional event; it has become a way of life. A war of extermination that takes many forms -- from bombardment, destruction, and the demolition of homes, neighborhoods, and camps, to siege, starvation, displacement, and homelessness. An entire environment in which the Palestinian person lives, and within which a child's consciousness is shaped.

There, children have learned that the world is not a safe place. They have learned that the roof may collapse above their heads, that the wall may bury their mothers and families and leave them wounded and alone beneath the rubble. The war of extermination has planted in the eyes of Palestine's children the panic of fearing the future -- the terror of an unknown tomorrow in a merciless, savage world.

Homes were destroyed, schools disappeared, and an entire life in Gaza was demolished -- a life that once gave childhood its natural shape. There is no longer a clear boundary between night and day, between play and fear, between dreaming and survival. Everything is drowned by the sound of bombs, buried under the rubble of destroyed camps.

What kind of world promises a child nothing but suffering? To be a target for warplanes, or an anonymous victim facing life without a father, a mother, or a family to care for them? And since when has war meant dropping bombs on residential neighborhoods, upon the bodies of mothers, upon the children themselves?

Beneath the rubble of destroyed homes, there are children who have endured the unbearable. The absence of their fathers, the anguish of their mothers, and a memory crowded with scenes of terror and death — images that should never inhabit the mind of a child at the moment they are first coming to know life.

In this war, a devastating term has emerged: "a wounded child with no surviving family." The body survived, but the world vanished. There is no longer a face dwelling in the heart of innocence that calls them by name. No tender mother's embrace opening its arms to them, no father's touch patting their head, no one to reassure them that everything will be alright.

When a child loses their parents, they lose their refuge, their world, and the mirror of life through which they come to know themselves. They lose the meaning of safety, the meaning of belonging, and the meaning of having a place in this world.

If you look into the eyes of Gaza's children, you will see a gaze of fear beneath the spontaneity of innocent childhood -- as though fear seems inseparable from childhood with childlike innocence in that land tormented by occupation, wars of extermination, siege, starvation, and daily death.

In the eyes of Palestine's children, a gaze grows that is calmer than it should be, deeper than it should be -- as though it has compressed long years into a single moment. These are the features of children who have crossed the years of childhood in the instant of a bombing, only to settle in another time -- the time of struggle, a time in which children are aged by bombs before they ever set out into the broad, open horizon of life.

- Heroes without choosing

The Palestinian is forced to rely on every possible means simply to survive. The child who carries water over long distances, the girl who soothes her brother amid buildings leveled by airstrikes, hiding her own fear from him -- they are heroes without ever choosing to enter the world of adults. They are children who were never given the chance to be small, to live their lives as children -- playing, rejoicing, learning, and taking their full time before confronting life's challenges.

Their tragedy is not only in what they have lost, but even more so in the uncertainty that shrouds their future. Every school that was bombed was a world of lives and dreams. When a child is deprived of a normal life, deprived of education, of dreaming, of discovering life with an open imagination -- they are deprived of the simplest thing that makes life bearable.

And yet, something still resists. Amid this wreckage, childhood grows like grass forcing its way through stone, defying the will of killers and enemies of life. Palestine's children, despite everything that has happened, are still searching for meaning in life, for a moment of safety, for a future they can live without bombardment and without daily threat.

They are not merely victims. They are witnesses to an era in which humanity is tested in its meaning, its essence, its values, its morality, and its limits. They are witnesses to a world that coexists with savage wars of extermination and the brutal regimes that wage them. But they are also, in another sense, the remnants of hope. Because their very survival, despite everything, is a form of resistance.

In Gaza, a child is born twice: once from their mother's womb, and once from beneath the rubble of a savage war.

These children are not a passing headline, nor a temporary image. They are an open question before the conscience of the world: Are we still capable of feeling? And is it enough to watch -- or does humanity demand more than that?

Words may fall short of encompassing all this pain, but they are a word of truth that must be spoken. The voice of a living conscience that must rise, so that this entire tragedy does not pass in silence. The gravest thing that can happen is not only that these children suffer -- but that the world grows accustomed to their pain.

*** This article has been penned by Tawakkol Karman -- a journalist, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate -- for Türkiye's state-run news agency Anadolu.