A child is being killed by Israel every 45 minutes in Gaza. As we write, this threatens to get even worse.
This is hard to take in: children are being systematically slaughtered in your name with funds and diplomatic support provided by your government. With the ascension of the fascist Trump regime to power, the horror is being taken to a whole other level. There are three questions every decent person, every person with a shred of conscience living in this country, must answer:
- how can this be stopped, as soon as possible;
- what gave rise to this; and
- what can put an end to this and countless other horrors and atrocities?
183 Children Killed March 18-19 Alone
In the middle of the night on Tuesday, March 18, Gaza’s remaining hospitals were flooded with the wounded and dead, carried by their loved ones, driven in ambulances or cars, or piled into donkey carts.
That night Israel had shattered the two-month-old ceasefire it had agreed to with Hamas by launching 100 simultaneous attacks across Gaza—with U.S. supplied weapons. The toll was staggering. Within 36 hours, 436 were killed. Of those, more than 183 were children.
"One nurse was trying to resuscitate a boy sprawled on the floor with shrapnel in his heart. A young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering. A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around 4 years old, whose foot had been blown off. Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue," an American intensive-care pediatrician volunteering at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, told the Associated Press.
"What stunned doctors was the number of children… Just child after child, young patient after young patient," a UK surgeon said.
One was Mohammed Abu Hilal, who was a year old. He was killed along with his mother at the al-Mawasi camp. Israel had claimed it was a “safe zone.”
Mohammed was one of 895 one-year-olds—and one of 935 children named Mohammed—killed by Israel since October 7, 2023.
30 Children a Day Killed by Israel in Gaza
Israel’s March 18 midnight massacre drew back the curtain on Israel’s depraved slaughter of children in Gaza—a core element of its overall genocide of the Palestinian people.1
Over the last 542 days Israel has killed over 17,400 children, and wounded tens of thousands more. And there are uncounted hundreds, if not thousands, of dead still buried under the rubble. That translates to roughly 30 children killed in Gaza every day, or one every 45 minutes.
Who were the children Israel has killed? The documented deaths include more than 1,720 babies and infants who hadn’t taken their first steps. There have been 10,944 preschool, elementary, and middle schoolers killed before they could grow up. And there have been 2,949 youth of high school age killed as they were preparing to go out into the world. Among the 17,400 killed, 8,899 were sons and 6,714 were daughters.
But the outright killing isn’t the only thing that’s robbed the youth of Gaza—who make up over half its two million plus population—of the joys of childhood, the hope and aspirations of youth.
Since October 7, 2023,2 Israel has destroyed their homes, reduced their schools to rubble, shattered the healthcare systems they rely on, deprived them of food, water, and medicine, and killed or wounded their parents, siblings, friends and relatives.3
More Child Amputees Than Anywhere in the World
Elias is four years old, his sister Taline is five, and his brother Khaled is nine. Elias and Taline suffered terrifying injuries when an Israeli missile hit the home they were sheltering in. The explosion tore Elias’s right leg off below the knee. Taline suffered severe leg injuries, and is fighting an infection. They are among the very lucky few who have been able to travel abroad for medical care, and their plight highlights one of the hidden horrors of Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza—the children who’ve had limbs blown off or amputated.4
“It is estimated that at least 110,000 people in Gaza have been injured, including at least 25,000 children,” the Guardian reports. “And UNICEF estimates that between 3,000 and 4,000 children in Gaza have had one or more limbs amputated. That small tract of earth is now home to more child amputees per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world.” [Emphasis added]
One reason: some Israeli bombs and shells are packed with metal designed to fragment and spray high levels of tiny shrapnel. These are weapons designed to maximize casualties, according to Amnesty International, and they’re being used in densely-populated urban areas. These weapons of war crimes have caused many of the deaths, amputations and severe wounds that medical workers are seeing.5
Doctors volunteering at two Gaza hospitals told the Guardian that most of their operations were on children hit by small bits of shrapnel. “About half of the injuries I took care of were in young kids,” said trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa, a volunteer from California. “We saw a lot of so-called splinter injuries that were… much, much smaller than anything I’ve seen before but they caused tremendous damage on the inside.”
Outrageously, Dr. Sidhwa said that many children lose limbs which could have been saved if Gaza’s hospitals and healthcare system hadn’t been decimated by Israeli bombs and its blockade of food, water, and medical supplies. “It’s very difficult to heal a wound when you have no protein intake for a week, let alone for 15 months,” Dr. Sidhwa said.
Scholastacide: Robbing Gaza’s Youth of Education
“Thirteen-year-old Farah Zaqzouq loved school. Her eyes light up as she describes her daily routine before the war in Gaza and her school, which she could see from her bedroom window. ‘I used to wake up early and mom made me breakfast, I’d get dressed in my school clothes, then did my hair… I’d go in and say hi to the principal and my teachers, I’d help with the school activities. I was top of my class.’ Her smile disappears as her mind switches back to her present-day reality. Both her home and school have been destroyed. Stony-faced, she walks over the ruins of the place of learning that once made her feel safe and happy.” (Education in ruins: Gaza’s children on losing their right to learn, CNN, March 29, 2025)
Israel has systematically targeted and destroyed Gaza’s schools and educational institutions. Some 70 percent of school buildings have been directly hit by Israeli airstrikes. A quarter of university campuses have been destroyed. Over 95 percent of all educational institutions in Gaza have been impacted by Israeli attacks. There are some 745,000 students in Gaza, from elementary school to higher education. None have had any formal education for over a year.
There’s a name for this: scholasticide—the deliberate destruction of a country’s education by killing, wounding, or imprisoning teachers and students, and destroying the educational infrastructure. The United Nations is calling what’s happening in Gaza “a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society.”
We Must Stop This Before It’s Too Late!
Israel’s total blockade of Gaza is entering its fourth week—with no food, fuel or aid entering Gaza. Electricity has been cut off and water may be next. Healthcare workers in Gaza have issued a malnutrition alert as hunger is spreading and possible starvation looms.
Israel has blocked all foreign journalists from reporting from Gaza, and killed more than 200 Palestinian journalists. All this in an effort to prevent them from reporting on the depraved slaughter of Palestinians—including children—that the U.S. and Israel are carrying out in Gaza—and refuting Israel’s firehose of lies about its massacres.6
Massacres are continuing every day, and Israel and the U.S. are threatening worse to come. This past week Israel’s Defense Minister warned, "The IDF will soon operate forcefully in other areas of the Gaza Strip, and you will be required to evacuate and lose more and more territory…. The plans are ready and approved."
On March 22, Israel’s cabinet voted to create a new directorate tasked with accelerating the “voluntary departure” of Palestinians—in other words the ethnic cleansing of Gaza—as Trump has repeatedly pushed for. And Trump’s Middle East envoy recently issued a veiled threat to Egypt that the U.S. would cut off aid if it didn’t take in Palestinians displaced from Gaza.7
Now is not the time to turn away from the horror rapidly unfolding in Gaza. There are two things everyone living in this country must start to do right now, as they dig into the questions we began this article with: act to stop this, and do so as part of driving this fascist regime out of power at the soonest possible moment.
Stop the U.S.-Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian People
Stop the Suppression of Anti-Genocide Protest and the Arrest of Pro-Palestinian Students
In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!
The Fascist Trump Regime Must Go!
