- For the past six months, I have woken at 3am most mornings. By that time, my son has usually made his way to my bed. He is a sociable sleeper and gets lonely on his own in his room. I smell his hair and listen to him breathe, watching his chest rise and fall in the same way I used to when he was a new baby and I needed to check he really did exist. As I do this, I look over his head and scroll through my phone, reading about the unrelenting massacres of Palestinians in Gaza, including little children who look like my son and share his middle names.
- By 1 March 2024, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) had killed at least 12,300 children in Gaza through bombings, shootings, and enforced starvation. In October 2023, a video circulated on social media of a man carrying two plastic bags filled with the body parts of his children as he exclaims, “Ya nas ya nas, hadol wladi!” (“People, people, these are my children!”). Palestinian feminist scholar Nadeer Shalhoub-Kervorkian uses the Arabic word “ashla” to describe this dismembering, shattering, and scattering of Palestinian body parts and flesh, of this evisceration beyond death. Even before this genocide, Shalhoub-Kervorkian observed that “Palestinian bodies, both living and dead, are no-bodies that exist at the limits of the human”.
Continue reading at https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/june-2024/parenting/why-are-the-soldiers-hurting-palestinian-children/