Our Wednesday News Analysis | Nearly 40,000 Palestinian Children Orphaned by War in Gaza

Three-month-old baby Rim is the sole survivor in her family after an Israeli military attack on the home of the Abu Hiyye family in Khan Yunis, Gaza on August 15, 2024. (Photo by Mahmoud Bassam/Anadolu via Getty Images)

"As a result of losing their families and their ongoing exposure to the horrors of war, orphans are also living with severe psychological trauma.

Symptoms include involuntary urination, convulsions, aggressive behavior, and excessive nervousness."

KHAN YOUNIS — Eleven-year-old Mohammad Sharaara lies alone in a hospital bed at the Nasser Medical Complex. He is the sole survivor of six members of his family killed in an Israeli strike on their home in Khan Younis last month, including both his parents.

Mohammad lost his left leg in the bombing. He is receiving treatment to recover and resume his life with a permanent disability but has no one to care for or provide for him. While Mohamed’s immediate family fled south from Gaza City to Khan Younis in December 2023 in a doomed search for safety, his other relatives remained in the north.

“Losing my leg is not the biggest loss in my life, what hurts me more is that I want my mother. I don’t want to live without her,” Mohammad told Drop Site News, his voice wracked with pain.

With a ceasefire deal that went into effect on January 19, the relentless Israeli airstrikes and attacks in Gaza have, for the time being, largely ended. Aid has started to arrive. Preparations are underway for medical evacuations to resume and displaced residents are planning to return to the north. Palestinians in Gaza have only begun to take stock of the war’s devastating toll: over 47,000 confirmed killed, over 111,000 injured, and vast swathes of the enclave bombed, bulldozed, and in ruins.

For the children of Gaza, the carnage is unprecedented in recent history. Over 14,500 children have been killed since October 2023, according to the health ministry. Of the 1.9 million people — 9 out of 10 residents in Gaza — who have been internally displaced, half of them are children, according to UNICEF. Many of the surviving children belong to a new generation of Palestinian orphans...

Read more: Nearly 40,000 Palestinian Children Orphaned by War in Gaza

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MY TWO GENOCIDES

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/01/my-two-genocides/

By Jacob Boas
Published January 19, 2025

In my life, I have been enmeshed in two genocides. The first was when I survived the Holocaust in World War II. The second is the Gaza genocide, which is being carried out in my name and which is exploiting my story to justify the slaughter.

Palestinians bury the bodies of 48 Palestinians, handed over by the Israeli army through the Kerem Shalom border crossing, in a mass grave in the city of Rafah, on March 7, 2024. (Photo: © Mohammed Talatene/dpa via ZUMA Press APA Images)

“‘Where Was the World …"

"The original Yiddish publication of Elie Wiesel’s Night was
And the World Remained Silent.

'Where was the world?’
reiterated Wiesel in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

The Germans did their utmost to keep the truth at bay.

“A glorious page of history that’ll never be written.”

SS chief Heinrich Himmler

Enmeshed in two genocides I am: the first, the Holocaust, took place in Europe during World War II; the second, in occupied Gaza, set off by Hamas’ onslaught on Israel on October 7, 2023. I came into the world on November 1, 1943. Place of Birth: Camp Westerbork, a transit camp in the northeastern Holland. By then, some 100,000 Dutch Jews and several hundred Sinti and Roma had been deported to the death camps in Poland. I am a victim of that genocide, neither perpetrator nor bystander. As for Gaza, there I am complicit, if only because the slaughter of 6,000,000 European Jews, including 1.5 million children, serves as a cover for the ongoing genocide in West Asia. Put differently: “Gaza” is the first genocide carried out in my name.

George Santayana’s oft-quoted dictum that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it assumes that we can learn from history, provided we make the effort. “History teaches but has no pupils,” Ingeborg Bachmann’s terse formulation is rather more apposite. And yet, “memory” made me a historian, a historian of the Holocaust, in duty bound to record and record and record. Between 1996 and 1998, I directed the Oregon Holocaust Research Center when it was located at Pacific University in Forest Grove. I had no illusions about the human capacity to do their worst, but nonetheless persevered in what I knew to be a quixotic enterprise in the belief that writings and teaching might do some good after all.

Now I feel used. The very scholarship that’s been my life has been appropriated by the genociders.

But now I feel used. The very scholarship that’s been my life has been appropriated by the genociders. I am appalled at the silence of Holocaust Centers and Holocaust museums everywhere, the weaponizing of antisemitism and other forms of brutalizing intimidation. Horrified by the moral bankruptcy of the US, Israel’s chief supplier of arms and genocidal co-sponsor, backed up by European vassals like Germany, Holland, and France, countries that like their feudal overlord have genocidal and colonial blood on their hands. Deep-rooted exterminatory propensities die hard. Not so very long ago, the Dutch and the French did their part in helping the Nazis carry out the routines of destruction. At his trial in Jerusalem, deportation czar Adolf Eichmann reported that the task of making the Netherlands Judenrein – “Jew-free” – was never a problem. “Too many functionaries carried out the occupier’s dictates,” acknowledged then Netherlands’ Prime Minister Mark Rutte in 2020 at the nation’s Holocaust commemoration. In France, the mass deportation of Jews to the gas chambers was a collaborative effort on the part of the French police, ministry officials, and railway managers...

Read more: My two genocides
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TRUMP SAYS ‘CLEAN OUT THAT WHOLE THING’ AS PART OF HIS PLAN FOR GAZA

Source: Middle East Eye
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/trump-says-clean-out-whole-thing-part-his-plan-gaza

By Lubna Masarwa
Published January 26, 2025

The US president suggests that Jordan and Egypt should take in more Palestinians from Gaza

US President Donald Trump listens to reporters’ questions aboard Air Force One on 25 January 2025 (Reuters)

"For 15 months, I lived in conditions beyond imagination. I lost my best friends, home, and life's work, and still, I remained steadfast on my land in the north.

This is not a choice;
Palestinians will not leave their land.

It is a part of our identity,”

US President Donald Trump has proposed a plan to "just clean out" Gaza and said he wants Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinians from the territory, ​​where Israel's onslaught has displaced over 90 percent of the population.

Trump called Gaza a "demolition site" and said he had spoken to Jordan's King Abdullah II about moving Palestinians out of the territory.

"I'd like Egypt to take people. And I'd like Jordan to take people," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, adding that he planned to talk to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on Sunday.

"You're talking about probably a million and a half people, and we just clean out that whole thing," Trump said of Gaza, whose population is about 2.4 million, adding that "something has to happen".

The overwhelming majority of Gaza's population has been displaced by Israel’s 15-month war, which has devastated much of Gaza and killed over 47,000 people.

Throughout the war, Israeli politicians have on several occasions called for the transfer of Palestinians to Egypt, in what rights organisations have condemned as support for “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza...

Read more: Trump says ‘clean out that whole thing’ as part of his plan for Gaza