If We Were in Hell, Would We See More Children Burn Than We See in Gaza?

Edited by Sam Thielman

I SAW THE SILHOUETTE of a little girl, alone, as everything around her burned in the predawn darkness.

Her name is Ward Jalal al-Shaikh Khalil. Only five years old, she survived the Israeli bombing of the Fahmi al-Jirjawi school-turned-shelter in Gaza City on Monday. Her mother and at least five of her siblings did not.

Wearing a pink Minnie Mouse shirt, Ward narrated her experience via an Instagram reel I saw posted by Middle East Eye. A camera followed Ward as she walked past the ruins of the school, pointing to the part of the building where her aunt was living. That was where she was when the missile hit. 

By this phase in the Israeli genocide of Gaza, we simply understand and move past the normalization of people taking shelter in a school. The next atrocity normalizes the last and erases the one before that. Each subsequent day that Israel continues to assault Gaza is a promise that this five-year-old’s nightmare will be eclipsed. Who remembers last October, when Israel set the tent-packed courtyard of Deir el-Balah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital aflame? 

Abed, Mohammed, Amal, Maryam, Silwan. Ward recited names that I understood to be her brothers and sisters. "All of them were killed except for me," she said. She is not much older than my younger daughter.

Citing the Gaza Ministry of Health and two Gaza City hospitals—all of which Israel tells us we shouldn't believe, because they're part of an infrastructure governed by Hamas; or, in the case of the hospitals, are secret staging grounds for Hamas militants—al-Jazeera reported that the attack on the school/shelter killed 36 people. The Israeli warplanes, likely made in America, fired missiles, also likely made in America, that struck the school "three times, while people slept." Most of those killed were likely to be women and children, per AFP, if they are even able to be identified. Ward's uncle told Middle East Eye that he mostly encountered "pieces" of people at the school. 

IF WE WERE to awaken tomorrow in the furnaces of Hell, do you think we would see more or fewer children burning?

If we were to discover that the world around us has been a diabolical simulation, a trick to disorient us before we experience undisguised torment, would we hear anything worse than the pleas of 6-year old Hind Rajab begging the Red Crescent to save her?  

If suddenly we found ourselves in a pit of eternal damnation, would we encounter anything worse than a little girl my older daughter's age mixing what she calls "famine-type labneh" on a cooking-content account intended to humanize Palestinians while the thumbs of the world scroll past her? Would we be able to meet her eye as she smiles at us through her starvation, explaining in a caption that she would like to eat her labneh with bread, but she's already run out of her daily bread allotment, thanks to the U.S.-backed Israeli stranglehold on Gaza that the second straight U.S. president laments while continuing to support? 

If we were to descend into the stronghold of the devil, would we be provisioned any differently than the desperate multitudes in Rafah penned into overpacked queues by the American mercenaries of the "Gaza Humanitarian Foundation," who lost control of their own weaponization of aid before the IDF reportedly fired warning shots at starving people?? 

If we were in the presence of the Enemy himself, would he tell us lies more risible than the Fahmi al-Jirjawi School being "a command and control centre…that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad used to gather intelligence for attacks"? Or that aid must be routed into the hands of armed mercenaries because otherwise Hamas will steal it? Or that the "real story" of the mercenary aid debacle is "the fact that it's working"? Or that he's working tirelessly to stop the carnage? 

BUT THIS IS NOT HELL. There is no cosmic, metaphysical entity directing the suffering of Palestinians. Every single day of this 19-month genocide has been a day that the United States of America has been powerful enough to end it.

Instead, every single day of this 19-month genocide has been a day that the United States of America has facilitated it. Every single day of this 19-month genocide has been a day that people with power in both American political parties denied it, censured those few willing to call it what it is, worked to oust from power those further few willing to oppose it, and even called for it to get worse. In the more recent days of the genocide, the people with power have seized and marked for deportation those who have spoken out against it, fulfilling the promise of billionaires in group chats who called for the police to be unleashed upon youths protesting the complicity of their authority figures. Every single one of these powerful people will take offense at being called the simultaneous genocide denier-enablers that they are. 

There is no way of speaking about Gaza as an Israeli genocide alone. It is an American-Israeli genocide. The American political, security and media establishments have shown greater antipathy to those who find the genocide unbearable than to those committing it. Nor is there any ambiguity about the provenance of the missiles that set children like Abed, Mohammed, Amal, Maryam and Silwan on fire, nor the provenance of the software that enabled it. And every day this nightmare persists and its perpetrators go unpunished is a promise that the U.S. and Israel will consign ever more children to the flames. 

A CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION from FOREVER WARS' piece this week about the torture of Ammar al-Baluchi. I quoted al-Baluchi's attorney Jay Connell as saying Col. McCall's straightforward acknowledgement of the torture was unprecedented for a judge. I should have remembered that federal judge Susan Crawford in 2009 acknowledged Mohammed al-Qatani's Guantanamo torture as straightforwardly in 2009. For that matter, and I in particular should have remembered this, so did Col. Douglas Watkins, the military judge in Majid Khan's case. FOREVER WARS regrets running Connell's quote unqualified.