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Gaza’s children have no future War cares not for the next generation

Pity the children. (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty)

Pity the children. (Photo by BASHAR TALEB/AFP via Getty)


October 26, 2024   4 mins

When I was a boy, growing up in Gaza, we used to play a game called “Arabs and Jews”. Two children would be designated captains and pick their teams, then we would find some sticks, pretend they were guns, and spend hours happily pretending to shoot each other. When one of the Arab team was “killed”, his comrades would hoist him onto their shoulders and utter a chant in Arabic. “With our soul and our blood,” we cried, “we redeem you, martyr.”

I still live in Gaza, and I still see children playing after more than a year of war, usually in the large open areas that have been flattened by Israeli airstrikes, among the ruins of destroyed buildings.

But their game has been updated. Now, the children of Gaza call it “Hamas fighters and Jews” — and they’ve added other new elements too. They pretend they’re being chased by Israeli drones, whispering to each other, “there’s a drone coming! We must hide!” Sometimes, they pretend to blow up Israeli tanks with mines and IEDs. They play for hours, because they have no other entertainment, and nowhere else to go. But the chant when a fighter “dies” is the same as it always was, though there are far more real martyrs now than when I was a kid. Many of them are children too.

Thousands of children under the age of 18 have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel last year. Many more have been injured and maimed and thousands are thought to be uncounted.

Every aspect of the lives of those who have survived has been upended. The schools and kindergartens have been closed since October 7, and untold thousands have lost their homes.

Palestinian society has always been characterised by close family relationships, and young children find it very hard to accept that a brother or sister is dead. I hear them all the time. Adults will tell them they’re in paradise, but they don’t really know what that means. “He went shopping, but soon he will come back,” they say instead. “She went for a picnic and had to stay away a few nights, but I’m sure she’ll be home quite soon.” 

I spoke to the mother of Abdeltaffah Montasir, who lost his father at the age of four. “He was no fighter,” she told me. “But like so many of us, he was killed. All the time the boy is asking about his father, demanding to know when he will return. He says he thinks he will be back when the war ends, and then asks me when that will be. How can I answer that? I have to deal with his grief, and I am grieving too.”

Some children try to compensate for the lack of anything resembling a normal, routine life. They badger their parents for school bags and uniforms, so that when the war ends, they’ll be ready to go back to class, and they want to be like other children when they do. It’s as if they think that by asking for something that will only have meaning when the war finally ends, they will bring that day closer.

“The children of the Gaza Strip naturally suffer from the effects of the trauma they have experienced, such as fear, introversion and loss,” explains Ola Kamal, a local child psychologist. “They relive violent events in their thoughts and in their play. Many suffer from nightmares and insomnia.

They suffer from an absence of positive emotions. Some act out their trauma with hyperactive excitement and tantrums, others display severe and persistent fear and sadness. Sometimes they deny what happened to them or their family, or try to avoid the places or people associated with a violent event.

“This war,” Ola says, “is creating a deeply troubled and hopeless generation.”

Palestinians have always placed a high value on education, and we are proud of our low illiteracy rate. Bothina Abdel Fattah, a mother of six aged 42, who lives in Deir Al Balah, tells me she fears that having gone without schooling for over a year, her kids have already forgotten much of what they knew. “Their level of achievement and knowledge have gone down significantly,” she says. “Yet most of the schools are not just closed, their buildings have been badly damaged or totally destroyed. When will they be able to start learning again? The longer this goes on, the more they will forget.”

“When will they be able to start learning again?”

“Because of the war, everything we valued has collapsed,” says Iyad Abdul Hakeem, for many years a teacher. “Instead of going to school, our students are in the streets or standing in lines for water, bread and other kinds of food. If the war were to stop tomorrow, it would take an enormous effort to make up for what has been lost.”

The schools may be closed, but there are voluntary initiatives trying to fill the gap. One is based in a small park in Al Bourej, where displaced people who lost their homes now live in tents.

Run by a teacher, Sabreen Fetiha, it provides basic tuition under canvas or in the open air in literacy and maths for over 200 children who would normally be in the first four grades of primary school. “We are trying to reconnect students to the educational process and compensate for part of their educational loss,” Fetiha explains, “and we hope this will prepare them to return to ordinary, full-time education when the war finally stops.” 

Fetiha has managed to recruit three colleagues, who each have different specialist subjects, while stationery and other equipment has been donated by residents of the Bourej camp.

But welcome as the voluntary school is, it can feel dangerous to gather in the park. People are afraid that it could become a target. 

And still the war grinds on. There was hope for months it would finish on the anniversary of October 7, and then, for a short time, after Yahya Sinwar was killed. But things keep changing. People were astonished that Sinwar died the way he did. They thought he was spending all his time in the tunnels, yet there he was, fighting on the frontline. Now he is widely seen as a hero, as a symbol of resistance, and even intellectuals who never supported Hamas are comparing him to Che Guevara, saying he’ll be seen as a symbol of revolution and resistance for years to come — for Palestinians and others too.

So Sinwar’s death has made Hamas more determined, not less. They’ll fight on to the end, and like Sinwar they don’t care if they die, because they believe that then they’ll begin their new, pleasant, trouble-free life in paradise.

And so, with neither side letting up, the war will last for many more months unless the international community somehow finds a way to stop it. The children playing fighters and Jews have told me they don’t ever want to become fighters for real, but if the war does not end, my fear is that they will.


Hasan Jber is a journalist in Gaza and writer for the Al-Ayyam newspaper in the West Bank.


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UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
17 days ago

Israel left Gaza with a port, an airport, a functioning economy, a beachfront with vast tourist potential, and an industrious population. Gaza could have become a prosperous and important banking and tourist centre, and Israel would have helped them develop. Instead the people of Gaza chose leaders whose sole interest was to use Gaza to import weaponry and attack Israel. Israel reacted by destroying the airport and embargoing the port, and controlling movement in and out of Gaza. What else did Gazans expect? They had an opportunity and they blew it. As Abba Eban so accurately said long ago, the Palestinians never miss and opportunity to miss and opportunity.

Danny Kaye
Danny Kaye
16 days ago

What as sad article. The saddest part is the end. Just when you thought that Hasan, an adult Gazan, would take some responsibility for Gaza’s children, you find that he is still lionizing Yahya Sinwar, the man who put Gaza in this predicament, that he is rejecting all responsibility for the situation that led to the death of thousands of Israelis and tens of thousands of Gazans, and that he is calling on the “international community” to find a solution.
Until Gaza’s adults stop acting like children and start building an ethos of construction rather than of destruction, until they take responsibility for the future of Gaza’s children, this future will be doomed.

Philip Broaddus
Philip Broaddus
15 days ago
Reply to  Danny Kaye

Aside, and this may provide a glimmer of relief to this bleak topic, I met Danny Kaye, as a 14-year-old, in Kansas City. He was visiting a close friends of my parents, down the block, with whom he was friends going way back. He was kind to stand when I walked in the room. (Is that your real name, and not a play on Danny Kaye, the actor?)

Michael Clarke
Michael Clarke
15 days ago
Reply to  Danny Kaye

It is a sad article but the saddest part is not at the end. The saddest part is in every sentence.

Ian Denno
Ian Denno
7 days ago
Reply to  Danny Kaye

He didn’t lionize Sinwar at all. Maybe he does outside of this article, I don’t know, but here he just described how people reacted to his death.

Paul MacDonnell
Paul MacDonnell
17 days ago

“People were astonished that Sinwar died the way he did. They thought he was spending all his time in the tunnels, yet there he was, fighting on the frontline.”

This is simply not true. Sinwar did indeed spend all of his time in tunnels. He was merely caught moving between them as the IDF closed in, and he was in fact armed only with a stick it seems!

There should be an award for writers, and indeed reporters, who produce Palestinianist apologetics like this. The literary style is to trace a thin red thread through the history and the politics of Gaza and the West Bank, weaving an emotionally manipulative narrative that carefully avoids any sense of Arab agency or political responsibility.

Charlie Two
Charlie Two
16 days ago

What was the point of this article? The Arabs are the settler imperialist coloniser rapist enslavers. They began this conflict, not just on 7 October. And not one mention that hamas refuses to let its own civilians use our raid shelters. When the rapist mass murderers of October rang their mothers to tell them what they’d done, the scum shouted back ‘my son is a hero!!’. This article somehow misses that and more. It’s one long turgid boohoohoohoo for those who dont deserve our sympathy.

Hugh Thornton
Hugh Thornton
16 days ago

How tragic. It shows a great lack of proper parenting. Parents need to tell their children that Hamas are evil and look at the death and destruction they have brought upon Gaza. They need to say that even if they don’t like the existence of Israel, its existence is a fact and that they must learn to live in peace and harmony and concentrate on making Gaza successful instead of working to destroy Israel.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
16 days ago
Reply to  Hugh Thornton

Well said, Hugh.

Hugh Thornton
Hugh Thornton
14 days ago
Reply to  Hugh Thornton

As of this writing, I see I have 3 thumbs down. I assume those 3 want to see the destruction of Israel. If so, have a look see how that is working out for Hamas and Hezbollah and for the people of Gaza and Lebanon. Wouldn’t it be better if these countries got rid of their terrorists and worked on making themselves prosper? I actually agree that Israel sometimes needs a bit of reining in, but that ain’t going to happen until there is sustainable peace.

Seb Dakin
Seb Dakin
17 days ago

Well, tell your ‘fighters’ to stop putting other people’s children in the microwave.
And those hostages, they are people’s children too.

General Store
General Store
17 days ago

NO future in Gaza or with Hamas or as Palestinians…..there corrected for you. Neither did the 2 million germans kicked out of their homes in Eastern Europe in 1945….Or the millions of Christian Arabs kicked out of Syria, Lebanon, Iraq……How about Iranian Jews?….Yazidis? A pattern repeated in hundreds of conflicts over the world. Shit happens. They are refugees. They assimilate and next generation are Egyptian or Syrian…… The only reason this is the exceptional hill the left choose to die on is because ‘the Jews’. The only reason

Jonathan Nash
Jonathan Nash
16 days ago
Reply to  General Store

Exactly this. In fact there were about 8 million displaced persons in East Central Europe at the end of the War. And let’s not forget the hindus and moslems who lost their homes – and lives – when the India/Pakistan border was drawn.

The Palestinian exception is that for domestic political reasons the surrounding Arab countries continued to pretend that the war which was lost in 1948 can still be won. In recent years that has been changing, which is why Iran/ Hamas attacked last October.

Rafi Stern
Rafi Stern
14 days ago
Reply to  General Store

Or the hundreds of thousands of Jews evicted penniless from Muslim countries when Israel was established. Their Jewish brethren absorbed them in Israel (not without that absorption’s own traumas) and now make up over half the population of Israel.

Tony Plaskow
Tony Plaskow
17 days ago

I am confused, why do you not have an answer to little Abdeltaffah Montasir’s question about when the war will end? Israel has always said, openly, the war will end when the genocidal terrorists give back the 101 human hostages they stole. Now, of course, they don’t want to so the war which Hamas started, and for which they use their civilian population as human shields will rage on.
But there is a relatively easy answer. Here’s another hugely insightful piece of information about avoiding further conflicts – stop genocidal missions against Israel. Poooow, mind b l o w n.
You decry that the children miss the education they receive which inculcates and imbues them with pure hatred and antisemitism, teaching them that Israelis are the enemy and must be killed – that’s the education you fear they’re missing?

0 0
0 0
16 days ago
Reply to  Tony Plaskow

Well said. Is that the “education” their parents care so much about?
Unfortunately, it is this “education” that creates homicidal monsters that rejoice in rape, torture and murder.
So, no, no regrets.

Alison R Tyler
Alison R Tyler
15 days ago
Reply to  0 0

Should we not at least try to end the war and change what the children learn ?
I find it very hard to sleep when I think of all the children killed and maimed in mind and body, when they of all people have no capacity to act in any direction

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
16 days ago

Maybe Sinwar was booking it for Qatar and didn’t quite make it? Most soldiers don’t go to war with 10k in their pockets.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago

I find it hard to believe this article was written by someone who is trying to portray Palestinians in a positive light. It’s a written testimony to the culture of death, infantile narratives, and total reliance on the charity of nations for help. With leaders and intellectuals such as this writer, how unsurprising it is that they’ve achieved nothing.

J. Hale
J. Hale
1 day ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

And note the mother with six children. Thanks to the UN, the more children the Palestinians have, the bigger welfare check they get from UNRWA. This can’t go on indefinitely.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
17 days ago

The children of Gaza will have a wonderful future when the psychotic puppets of Tehran are put of power and rational, peaceful life can emerge.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I think you mean Tel-Aviv

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

I think you are demonstrating my point perfectly.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
17 days ago

This is the life that their elders have made for them, decade after decade.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
16 days ago

When Imperial Japan was defeated by the USA, I notice that the children, adults, and elderly amongst the Japanese population worked on their national character to improve and bring peace to their country. Ditto for Nazi Germany under the same circumstances. Both nations lost land after WWII. Both nations were defeated after aggressive war. But both underwent genuine regret and change for the good. Will Gazans do this? That is the question …..

Dana G
Dana G
15 days ago
Reply to  Samuel Ross

It seems that Palestinians have only the identity category (mainly a flag) but lack the culture to fall back on

Dana G
Dana G
15 days ago

The suffering of Palestinian children is very disturbing. However, I don’t see it as more virtuous or moral to mention it for the sake of performance, although I wrote it.

Palestinians see education as important—only because they are in close proximity to Israel, which in better times allowed them to get their physician internships inside Israel. All their education was funded from outside—mainly Europe and the US—so they are not people who create; they are people who are righteous victims. It seems that Palestinians have only the identity category (mainly a flag) but lack the culture to fall back on (unlike Germans and Japanese, who were mentioned in previous comments). Zionists, however, have a Jewish identity infused with cultural aspects such as language revival, education, and working the land—all funded by themselves. The Jewish people were able to absorb more than half a million Jewish Arabs and North African refugees successfully after 1948. Egypt didn’t do it, Jordan didn’t do it, Syria didn’t do it and it seems that Palestinians were not able to create their own culture identity as well.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
14 days ago
Reply to  Dana G

Well said, Dana.

Phil Re
Phil Re
15 days ago

The role of UNRWA and the BBC in all of this should not be overlooked.

UNRWA raised a generation of children in Gaza to be extremists.

The BBC preserved the narrative after Israel left Gaza that the continued violence from Gaza was still resistance to Israel.

Cantab Man
Cantab Man
17 days ago

It saddens me to read how little Hamas values the future of these children and their own people’s land and prosperity in the Gaza Strip. Instead, Hamas happily traded them all for the wages of war: Destruction, displacement, despair, death, ashes and dust.
When will an older generation in the Gaza Strip be strong enough to stand against those in Hamas who seek to steal the future from their children as well as their loved ones? A generation that is wise enough to guide and direct the younger generations to no longer play at dying in wars with neighboring States, but to play at living in peace instead?
When will this day come?

Peter Fisher
Peter Fisher
16 days ago
Reply to  Cantab Man

Whenever they realise that the problem is their irrational belief in a religion that calls for the deaths of those who don’t believe.

Chris Van Schoor
Chris Van Schoor
15 days ago
Reply to  Peter Fisher

..as if Allah, being all-powerful, was not quite capable of smiting the unbelievers Himself (if He really wanted to)..

Anti Babe
Anti Babe
15 days ago

and whose fault is that? that would be the arab leaders and hamas leaders who led gaza to ruin. no responsibility taken for your own people-seriously you’re adults-take some iniative. this article only highlights that the gaza society is rotten to the core from parents to children raised in disgusting jihadism and jew hatred. take some pride and ownership of your life and your leaders-fight out hamas. otherwise reap what you sow-tired of this victim mentality from the most catered to and most aggrieved people on the planet-the so called “palestinians” cry me a river and stop putting tunnels and weapons in your schools .

Robert H
Robert H
15 days ago

Hamas has built a culture that has radicalized and destroyed the youth of Palestine. The only hope for the Palestinian people is for a new leadership with Israeli oversight to rebuild. Start a de-radicalization of the population like what was done in Germany and Japan by Allied countries.
You cannot have a culture built on hate and its sole purpose to genocide another people. In this case Jews and Israelis.
It is incredibly sad this is the path the Palestinians have taken for the past 75 years. If they had wanted to live in peace they would have their own state and have one of the most beautiful places on earth in Gaza. We are at least 100 years from that becoming a reality based on Oct 7th.

Peter Fisher
Peter Fisher
16 days ago

That’s religion for you. It turns normal people into sociopaths. Without religion, good people will do good and bad people will do bad; but to get good people to do bad, that takes religion. I grew up in a council estate in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s. Some of us see through the bullshit, others get sucked in.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
16 days ago
Reply to  Peter Fisher

People wanting to fight find reasons one way or the other.

Ian Denno
Ian Denno
7 days ago

He didn’t lionize Sinwar at all. Maybe he does outside of this article, I don’t know, but here he just described how people reacted to his death.

George K
George K
17 days ago

Nothing personal, just wrong time wrong place. Israelis don’t hate Palestinians, they just see them through a narrow tribal lense. They fundamentally don’t care.

Lancashire Lad
Lancashire Lad
17 days ago
Reply to  George K

Of course they care. They care about the safety and ability to live in peace of their own younger generation(s), including the young people still held hostage.

The children of Gaza could so easily live in peace, once their elders stop attacking Israel, release the remaining hostages and stop supporting Hamas. Did anyone release articles or films in the UK about the children of Germany during 1914-18, or 1939-45? This article is pernicious.

Alison R Tyler
Alison R Tyler
15 days ago
Reply to  Lancashire Lad

Our attitudes to war have changed since then.
Because we can now see what happens within minutes.
The killing of children is evil by anyone,

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
15 days ago
Reply to  Alison R Tyler

Unless it is Christian children by Moslems, Jewish children bt Moslems, Yazidi children by Moslems….

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
17 days ago
Reply to  George K

You write as though Israel attacked Hamas and not the other way round.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago
Reply to  George K

So you not only don’t think Hamas and its primary controller, Iran, bear any responsibility in starting a war that uses the deaths of their own children as an explicit strategy.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
15 days ago
Reply to  George K

The Palestinian leadership has helped them not care.

Matthew Freedman
Matthew Freedman
17 days ago

Solution: everyone accepts everyones claim to a homeland here and the right to live peace. A 2 state or one state multicultural
Peace and coexistence solution is rolled out. Has the current war changed the situation on the ground apart lives cut short and rubble. Is forever wars going make 7 million Jews or several million Arabs and a host of minorities disappear from this land?

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago

Not a solution. An extermination. Here is an idea: Hamas surrenders immediately without condition, like the nazis they resemble. Gazans, including Gazans, stop dying. De-nazification of Gaza leads to peace, prosperity, freedom.

Brian Doyle
Brian Doyle
17 days ago

Food for thought
Let’s take on a pro rata basis the Gaza / UK Population
Then consider that the UK had been attacked in a similar fashion as Gaza has been
Well got this far then here is the simple blunt truth and reality of exactly what The UK would be like today

Killed – 1,302,000 of which children
558,000
And it’s certainly fair to assume that similar numbers exist for those that are buried under the rubble
Therefore
Killed – 2,604,000 of which 1,016,000 are children
Now let’s move on to the destruction and actual situation

Every UK city Flattened
No sewage or fresh water system
No roads , rail or port facilities
Total collapse of all heath facilities
Ditto for education
64,000,000 UK Citezens herded into refugee camps and continually
Issued with evacuation notices some of which issued with less than 30 minutes warning
Complete lack of a reliable food supply essential not only for Life
But for future health particularly of
Children

Now 2 very simple straight forward
Questions for you all and each only requiring a one word answer without any caveat whatsoever
Q 1 – Is this civilised YES or NO

Q 2 – Is this Genocide YES or NO
I am the Lord God almighty
For those who answer wrongly
Then a place in Hell awaits your arrival

Louise Henson
Louise Henson
17 days ago
Reply to  Brian Doyle

Gaza wasn’t attacked. Gaza did the attacking. Gaza was the agressor.

Bret Larson
Bret Larson
15 days ago
Reply to  Louise Henson

Pretty funny they get such facts wrong.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
16 days ago
Reply to  Brian Doyle

Out of curiosity, will the Gazans endeavor to remove the boot of Hamas from their necks? Hamas took over the government half through elections and half through violence, and kept it by force for 20 years (ish). I suggest that the responsibility for removing Hamas lies with the Gazans who truly desire peace.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago
Reply to  Brian Doyle

Since your premise, that Gaza,was attacked, is a lie the rest of your execerable anti-semitic blahblah is irrelevant. You you are the genocidal monster for supporting Hamas. You have condemned yourself to hell.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago
Reply to  UnHerd Reader

Agreed always the victim the Palestinians no responsibility taken for starting a war. No call for release of hostages which could stop the suffering. More Palestinian pathetic excuses.

Dana G
Dana G
15 days ago
Reply to  Brian Doyle

I hope that the UK will surrender immediately and not continue this war for the sake of their children. Then, the numbers you’ve mentioned will be meaningless.

Hendrik Mentz
Hendrik Mentz
17 days ago

It is discouraging that a post which tries to illustrate the consequences of hate on children, should be met with hate (judging by some of the comments).

Paul MacDonnell
Paul MacDonnell
17 days ago
Reply to  Hendrik Mentz

Like nearly all Arab writing on this issue, it has a subtext of emotional manipulation. See the comments about Sinwar and note what he doesn’t say. What these kind of accounts don’t say is more important than what they do say. They very scrupulously avoid any concept of Arab agency.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
16 days ago
Reply to  Hendrik Mentz

It is discouraging that the post opens with how young Arab children are taught to hate, and how they apparently, like the author, grow into heartless monsters who are ok with Hamas deliberately using their own children as props in a war they started.