‘I walked through the fire all by myself': An image of a child lays bare barbarism in Gaza

Irish Times

5 days ago

Two recent images, amid a deluge of images, encapsulate the intensifying moral horror of what is happening in plain sight in
Gaza
. The first is a piece of footage, filmed from the middle distance on a mobile phone, depicting the silhouette of a small girl staggering through an inferno – at a school on whose roof she and her family had been sheltering, along with other displaced
Palestinians
,
when it was hit by an Israeli missile
. It is as though we are glimpsing this little girl through a porthole on to hell itself: she walks through a furnace of billowing flames and roiling smoke, a figure of unbearable human vulnerability against a backdrop of colossal violence. To see this piece of footage – 11 seconds in length, totally silent – is to feel, for the thousandth time, a small wound open in the surface of the world.
A little more information, and the wound opens further still: the child's name is Ward Al-Sheikh Khalil, and she is five years old. We know that she got out of the building, and that she is still alive; we know that her mother was killed, as were five of her six siblings, and that her brother and her father are in hospital in critical condition. In a report on Channel 4 news, Ward sits on a broken pillar of concrete, wearing a pink T-shirt on which can be seen the white-gloved hand of Mickey Mouse.
'The rubble fell on them,' she says, of her brothers and sisters and her mother who did not survive. She is tiny, and her eyes are filled with tears. She says: 'I walked through the fire all by myself.'
I feel inclined to repeat those words, spoken by a child who has lost everything, who has had everything taken from her by an evil almost too vast and too blank to comprehend.
I walked through the fire all by myself.
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The second image is less intimate, more abstract in its horror. It is a photograph taken from the air, probably by a drone, of a mass of people crammed inside a series of narrow pens, like livestock at a mart. The low resolution of the image adds to its horror, suggestive as it is of surveillance, of human bodies under immense stress – the stress of hunger, and of heat, and of abject indignity. The image emerged from Rafah, in southern Gaza, where something called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation –
a Trump-backed and Israeli government-approved organisation operated by Safe Reach Solutions
, a private military contractor run by an ex-CIA officer – was handing out small aid packages to Palestinians. These are people who have, for close to three months now, been deprived of food by the blockade of Gaza, which is one of numerous war crimes committed by
Israel
with the support of its American collaborators.
Palestinians carry boxes containing food and humanitarian aid packages delivered by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Photograph: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP
The image's depiction of dehumanisation serves to underline the widespread view of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as a front for the ongoing displacement and dispossession of Palestinians. The British diplomat Thomas Fletcher, who until recently served as the UN's under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator, condemned the organisation as a 'fig leaf for further violence and displacement' and a 'deliberate distraction' from what is being done to the people of Gaza. As a distraction, it has succeeded only in drawing attention to its own artifice; on Tuesday, having forced thousands of starving Palestinians to walk through Israeli military lines to receive meagre aid, the American private security contractors and IDF soldiers administering the aid lost control of the crowd, and the soldiers opened fire.
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Both of these images depict life at such extremes of suffering and deprivation that they force us to confront the relationship between human beings and power. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has written about the process by which states have created black holes where legal restraints, such as the concept of rights, do not apply, and where people are reduced to what he calls 'bare life'. Concentration camps, extrajudicial detention facilities, sites of extraordinary rendition: places beyond the reach of law, where there is no limit to the violation that can be done to vulnerable humans.
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Seeing Israel use hunger as a weapon of war is monstrous to me as someone with a Holocaust legacy
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Gaza, long viewed as a gigantic open-air prison, is now a kind of vast black site, where everyone is deemed guilty, where anything can be done to them without recourse to any justice. The shooting of children by snipers; the bulldozing of massacred bodies into a pit; an open genocide: everything is permitted, because the most powerful people in the world are either doing nothing to stop it, or are directly collaborating. A child staggering through fire in a school destroyed by a missile; a starving crowd penned like animals by the false humanitarianism of their oppressors: these are images of bare life.
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It seems almost mealy-mouthed to say that what is being done to the Palestinians is being done not only to them, but to the future itself – as though it were not sufficiently bad that it is being done to them. But it seems clear enough that a terrible precedent is being set, or reset. When I see the kinds of images I am referring to here, and think about what they mean, I think of the book Chernobyl Prayer, by the Belarusian non-fiction writer Svetlana Alexeivich, and in particular a line about her country's failure to fully reckon with the horrific implications of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. 'Something from the future is peeking out and it's just too big for our minds.'
The post-second World War liberal order, based on the ideals of human rights and international law, has been gutted in Gaza, stripped and hollowed out in front of our eyes, as a genocide is committed with the support and collaboration of the wealthy and powerful nations of the West. What is left is as empty as a shell company posing as a humanitarian organisation. What is left is mere power, mercenary and without conscience.
Last week, in response to extremely mild pressure to end its blockade,
Binyamin Netanyahu
posted on social media a message of angry resolve. 'This is a war of civilisation over barbarism,' he wrote. 'Israel will continue to defend itself by any means until total victory is achieved.'
This language of civilisation and barbarism has been endlessly invoked by Israeli leaders and by their proxies in the media. And the more insistently it has been superimposed over the reality of a war of extermination, the more jarringly strange it has become. It's a moral perversion as absurd as it is vile. What Israel and the
United States
are doing to the people of Palestine is nothing but a technologically sophisticated barbarism. And it is precisely the destruction of civilisation that it represents.