Israel Is Minting the Next Generation of Hate
The children of Gaza still have dreams for their future. Who do they admire? Anyone who might protect them: a doctor, a journalist, the fighters from Hamas.
Jesse Rosenfeld
GAZA CITY — The bombs continue falling, more and more people are running for their lives with fewer places to go and as the screams from beneath the wreckage of Israel’s assault become more frequent, a generation of Gaza’s children are being shaped by what they see. And yet, as kids often do, they can still surprise you.
Inside a Gaza City UNRWA school that’s been turned into a shelter, children pack the courtyard. Several are kicking a soccer ball around. A blue United Nations flag sits atop the building and the windows below are draped with laundry that spills out onto lines that crisscross the outdoor walkways. The stench of the backed-up toilets combines with the fumes of garbage fermenting in the midday sun. Inside, piled desks covered in sheets in the hallways partition makeshift rooms for the families.
There are now some 200,000 people in Gaza living in conditions like this, and many if not most of them are children. At least half of Gaza’s people—that is, 900,000 of the people here—are under the age of 18.
When I enter the school building, I’m mobbed by dozen of perplexed and energetic kids tugging at my flack jacket. In fact, I feel strange decked out with protective combat gear in a sanctuary for families fleeing the fighting. But UNRWA shelters have been hit many times by Israeli shells and bombs in this three-week war. Just this morning, 16 people were killed in an UNRWA school/shelter in Jabaliya. So I wear the jacket.
The children, of course, have no such protection. For the most part the ones here are under ten years old. None has ever left the narrow and overcrowded 40-kilometer strip of land called Gaza. They cannot remember a world without Israel’s seven-year blockade. They are living through their third war.
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