World Children’s Day, in 2023 a special thought for the victims of Gaza

Since 1954, it is important, it is due, it is our responsibilitycelebrating children all over the world. November 20th is the occasion to recall that children have rights, that children have dreams and that the future for a better humanity rely on them.

But it is also the occasion to recall that those rights are regularly trampled, that children are the most vulnerable, the most suffering creatures, that they are the first to pay the price in critical times and in conflict.

It might not look appropriate ranking the tragedies based on gloomy figures of children killed, but what we are witnessing unfolding in Gaza since October 7th is the summit of cruelty or the abyss of humanity. Al Jazeera has commemorated this day as the World Children’s Tragedy. More than 5,500 children were killed by Israeli deliberate attacks. Not to count all those innumerable children that lost their mothers, their father, their siblings, their entire families. What their life will be, if ever there will survive? And the end of this massacre is not yet on sight. The #Children_of_Gaza, along with the adults, the elders, the medical staff, the journalists, all those having survived so far, are roaming like zombies, waiting for their turn, on the rubbles of the most horrible massacre even committed by Israelis in the occupied Palestinian territories since the Naqba in 1948.

Nothing more than this poem can tell the unthinkable situation the #Children_of_Gaza are under:

Write my name on my leg, Mama

Use the black permanent marker

With the ink that doesn’t bleed

If it gets wet, the one that doesn’t melt

If it’s exposed to heat

Write my name on my leg, Mama

Make the lines thick and clear

Add your special flourishes

So I can take comfort in seeing

My mama’s handwriting when I go to sleep

Write my name on my leg, Mama

And on the legs of my sisters and brothers

This way we will belong together

This way we will be known

As your children

Write my name on my leg, Mama

And please write your name

And Baba’s name on your legs, too

So we will be remembered

As a family

Write my name on my leg, Mama

Don’t add any numbers

Like when I was born or the address of our home

I don’t want the world to list me as a number

I have a name and I am not a number

Write my name on my leg, Mama

When the bomb hits our house

When the walls crush our skulls and bones

Our legs will tell our story, how

There was nowhere for us to run

By Zeina Azzam