She is “six years old. She is curled up in the back seat of her uncle’s car … “
Usually I’m able to find a few words to introduce a subject, or a person. In this case, I’m at a loss. All I can do is paraphrase Aaron Bushnell‘s question, this way:
“What would you do if your country was committing genocide?’
The answer is, you’re doing it.
Right now.”
Chris Hedges and Gabor Maté call Palestine “The Moral Issue of Our Time.”
The reason this moral outrage continues is because too many of us would prefer to ignore it.
Here’s an excerpt from Francesca Albanese‘s new book about childhood in Gaza (“When The World Sleeps”). In this excerpt she talks about the murder of six year-old Hind Rajab.
Let’s not ignore it.
End of january 2024. Hind Rajab is six years old. She is curled up in the backseat of her uncle’s car, hunched together with four cousins. As soon as the umpteenth evacuation order arrived in the western area of Gaza, her mother and brothers fled on foot, but since it is raining and cold, her uncles have put her in the car with them.
It is early afternoon; the exploding bombs can be heard even inside the car, which seems to be stuck in a traffic jam. Something is not right. The uncles sense that, they’re agitated, talking frenetically. Not far from a gas station near Tel al-Hawa, the car happens onto a barrage of fire from Israeli artillery. Then a surreal cold. Hind looks around: No one is talking, and they are all slumped over. With her hands surely shaking, she takes the phone from between the fingers of her fifteen-year-old cousin Layan, who was hit while she was talking to the relief workers from the Red Crescent. Hind explains that “the others are dead or maybe they’re sleeping” and begs for help. “The tank is right next to me. It’s moving. Will you come to get me? I’m so afraid.”
On the other end of the line, the aide — struggling to control her fear, because she knows the risk that Hind is facing — answers with affection, “Habibti” (Honey), and stays on the phone with her so she won’t be alone.
After three hours on the phone — the time it took her colleagues from the Red Crescent to coordinate with the Israeli authorities to locate the car and get permission to rescue the little girl — the aide reassures Hind that two rescuers are on their way to help her. The recording of that heartrending conversation, with the little girl’s life hanging by a thread, has been conserved for history and hopefully, one day, for the judges who will punish those responsible for the massacre in which Hind was killed by the Israeli army.
Twelve days later, Hind’s lifeless body would be found in the car that was riddled with more than three hundred bullet holes, not far from the ambulance that contained the dead bodies of her rescuers, who had been killed by the Israeli army. The investigation by the British team from Forensic Architecture led by Eyal Weizman, after reconstructing the distances and the dynamics of the gunfire, demonstrated that it is “not plausible” that the Israeli soldiers who shot at the car from the tank could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including the little girls.
Hind’s story has become a symbol of the brutality of the Israeli assault on the population of Gaza in the days following October 7, 2023. But Hind was killed more than three months after October 7th, when Israel had already killed ten thousand children. How is it possible to tolerate all this killing? And how is it possible that still today — as I am completing the revision of this book at the end of August 2025 — when the number of dead children has come to exceed twenty thousand, of whom more than one thousand were less than one year old, that impunity continues to reign and the death machine set in motion by Israel has not been stopped?
The answer lies in decades of narrative manipulation that has distorted the perception of the balance of power between Israelis and Palestinians.
In recent decades, this narrative has led many to believe that the Palestinians are to blame for their situation, that they are an existential threat to Israel. Even the children? Yes, even them, and maybe especially them, because in the logic of the Israeli assault begun on October 7th, every Palestine life is seen as a potential future danger to the survival of Israel.
Hind’s story, as atrocious as it is, is not an unusual one in Palestine. Mohammed Tamimi was two years old when, a few months before October 7, 2023, the Israeli occupation forces — formally known as the Israel Defense Forces — shot him in the head while he was in a car with his father in the occupied West Bank. No one has been held responsible, as usual.
This is childhood in Palestine.
