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Opinion | How Did Israelis Become So Indifferent to Children Killed in Gaza?
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Wedad Abdelaal, right, and her 9-month-old son Khaled who is suffers from malnutrition and her children Ahmed, 7 and Maria, 4, both showing signs of malnutrition also, pose for a photo in their tent at a camp for displaced Palestinians in Mawasi, Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, last Friday.Credit: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP
Carolina Landsmann
May 9, 2025
Children are, by nature, innocent of any crime. They are pure. The photos – the ones we refuse to see – of the children killed in the Gaza Strip, who already number more than 18,000, aren't just vibrant testimony to a disaster taking place in Gaza. They are also testimony to the disaster we are wreaking there.
These photos – which sometimes manage to penetrate the walls of denial and repression we have built around ourselves, whether through our social media feeds or through a news flash from some foreign media outlet – are also a desperate attempt to shatter the core of madness that has gripped us since October 7, 2023 and hasn't let us go even now, after more than a year and a half, even after more than 52,000 deaths in Gaza. At the center of this madness lies one clear, chilling belief: There are no innocents in the Gaza Strip.
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Our brains remind us of Abraham's negotiations with God over the fate of Sodom. If even 10 righteous men were found there, perhaps the entire city would not be destroyed. In a popular Hebrew saying based on this story, that later became even one righteous man. And if we could find even a single innocent in Gaza – that one righteous man in Sodom – perhaps we could appeal the collective sentence and stop the territory's destruction.
Mohammed Abed shows on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, the dress that his 4-year-old sister, Massa, was wearing during the Eid festivities just weeks before she was killed by an Israeli army strike in Zawaida, near the city of Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip.Credit: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP
Who could be more innocent than a child? But after 18,000 dead children, it seems this won't stop us or keep us from continuing to destroy Gaza.
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This indifference toward the slain children of Gaza ought to set warning lights flashing within us. It ought to worry us just as we're horrified when a beloved older relative starts to get confused about the identities of the people closest to him. It's one thing if he forgot to lock the door, however dangerous that is. But if he can't recognize his own children, that's already a sign of serious deterioration.
We must ask ourselves, how did we become so indifferent? How have our hearts become hardened to the deaths of children? Why are we silent in the best case, and even rejoicing in the worst, most horrible case? We must view this indifference as a sign that we are undergoing serious deterioration, a process that has affected our central moral nerve. This is a process that requires us to get help.
What made this possible? We're told that what happened on October 7, the inconceivable crimes committed against us, enabled it. By implication, the Palestinians are also to blame for our indifference – even for that. They, in their murderousness, made us indifferent to their children. We'll never forgive them for causing us to be indifferent to the killing of their children.
Palestinian children eat as they sit near the doorway of a damaged house in Gaza City.Credit: Omar al-Qatta
But if there are indeed any exceptional political circumstances that have the power to wipe the innocence of children's faces, to remove their inherent protection of innocence, to make them unfit even for basic human empathy – is that not precisely what is meant by the word "context"?
Context is precisely that web of historical circumstances that we were asked to take into account when we judged Hamas' actions on October 7.
The context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The context of the occupation, of the siege, of our desire to make the Palestinian problem vanish from the world's agenda. However, we refused. We insisted that nothing justifies the murder of children, the massacre of women and elderly people. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
However, if that is so, then we are obligated to ask – and by "obligated," I mean each and every one of us must ask themself at every moment – the following question: If nothing can justify what was done to us on October 7, how can it be that what we have been doing to them for more than a year and a half now – actions that have cost tens of thousands of people their lives and destroyed their lands – does seem justified to us?
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2025-05-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/how-did-israelis-become-so-indifferent-to-children-killed-in-gaza/00000196-b15f-d9bf-a1b6-f9ff212e0000
