Slain Palestinian Children Have Names, Too
When Will We "Say Their Names" and Share Their Stories?
It has become austere custom to highlight the faces and raise up the names of victims of mass violence. We see this in Buffalo, Uvalde and even Ukraine, where the accosted people of that European nation have emerged to globally embody the face of victimhood and righteous resistance.
This is especially true when the victims of vigilante or state-sponsored terror are children. In the West, and particularly the United States where mass shootings are routine, media commemorations of slain victims are certain to follow. On terrestrial and virtual media platforms, we see the faces, know the names, and learn about the figments of the lives shot down and left behind.
The faces and names scrolling past our timelines and screens, hit hardest when the victims are children. As they should.
These commemorations, whether showcased on ABC or on Instagram, make the victims real. It translates lifeless statistics of fatalities into vivid vignettes of real people, with real families from real places.
Just as importantly, the commemorations with the faces of the victims in the center, with their eyes starting at you from your telephone screen stay with you, as do their names. Months after the Sandy Hook or Uvalde shooting, the Russian siege on Kyiv or the terror attack in Paris of 2015, we can still remember the faces of many of the victims. Many of us might remember their names or have the faces of some of the youngest lives claimed etched into our minds.
As we should.
However, Palestinian children killed by Israeli bombs and gunfire have names, too.
Yet, we seldom see their faces. Get to know their names. Or learn about any dimension of their lives beyond the broad brush of “terrorism” or “collateral damage” that colors Palestinian life regardless of age or innocence.
This is the case, again, right now as I write these very words.
On Friday, August 5th, Israel launched another offensive on Gaza. Fueled by the banal and bigoted justification of “countering terrorism,” Israeli airstrikes killed at least 15 more people in the Palestinian territory – one of the most densely populated sections of the world.
One of the victims was a child: five-year old Alaa Qadoom, who was inside of her grandfather’s home in northern Gaza. She ran to her father, Abdallah, as he arrived by motorcycle during the thick of the air raid on Friday. Seconds later, Alaa and Abdallah were both dead.
Father and daughter, slain together.
Alaa was in kindergarten, precocious, and charged by that childish innocence that made living in an open-air prison livable. Until it wasn’t anymore.
In death, Alaa joined that invisible list of nameless and faceless Palestinian children slain under the rubric of “human shields” and “terrorists.” Then, swept under the rug and forgotten, forever.
Names like Hussein Hamad (11) and Hamza Ali (12), Mina Sharir (2) and Lina Sharir (15), Hala Rafi (13) and Miriam Talbani (2). Only six young victims among an endless set of slain children and teenagers buried deep in the Internet and erased from the pages of mainstream media outlets.
Slain Palestinians are killed twice. First, when their corporal bodies are struck down by gunfire or bombs. Second, when their names are stricken out of news coverage, their faces scratched out of view, and their entire lives uprooted from earth and the landscape of history.
Commemorating their lives keeps Palestinian victims alive, in the minds of those reporting and tweeting about them. And even more importantly, in the consciousness of the global community that absorbs the shape of their faces and the weight of their names. Particularly children, whose youth attaches to an innocence that should shield them from racist indictments of terrorism and the indiscriminate bombs that follow.
That innocence should also move us, and everyone, to commemorate their names as we would children from Uvalde or Ukraine, and sites of mass violence before and beyond them.
Palestinian children, like Alaa Qadoom, have names too.
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