For the past week, Palestinians in Gaza have been returning to their homes, now mostly reduced to rubble – and to their dead who still lie beneath. It is only now that we will start to get a fuller picture of the true toll of this war – only now that any kind of grieving or mourning can begin, a process that has been physically and emotionally denied to the Palestinians throughout the past 15 months. Once the final tally becomes clear, what will probably emerge is a colossal death toll of children.
Already, indications point to it being children that have made up the majority of casualties. UN analysis of verified deaths during a five-month period confirmed that of those who died, 44% were children. Most often, those children were five- to nine-year-olds; 80% of them killed in their own homes.
I would like you to pause with me here for a moment, at least for the duration of this column, and allow those statistics to become tragedies. Too often, individual losses during this war have been subsumed by a broader tussle over whether the numbers of the dead were correct, whether they were justified and even necessary. And now, a ceasefire pulls our gaze away from mortality and into analysis of what can and should come next. This is an exercise that needs to be done, of course. Millions in Gaza are still by no means out of mortal danger, their future is uncertain and they need protection now. But, in that, there is a risk of diminishing or sanitising what happened. And what happened is that thousands of innocent people died, and among them were thousands of children. ….more