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Irish Times
6 days ago
- General
- Irish Times
‘I walked through the fire all by myself': An image of a child lays bare barbarism in Gaza
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. READ MORE 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. [ Voicenotes from Gaza: 'I can't bear to see my children fighting over a loaf of bread' Opens in new window ] 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. [ Seeing Israel use hunger as a weapon of war is monstrous to me as someone with a Holocaust legacy Opens in new window ] 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. [ Paul Gillespie: Netanyahu could bring about the end of Zionism Opens in new window ] 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.
CBS News
27-05-2025
- Health
- CBS News
Tiny girl who emerged from flames of Israeli strike on Gaza school-turned-shelter says "fire filled the sky"
What to know about the controversial aid group beginning operations in Gaza Harrowing cell-phone video shows the tiny silhouette of Ward Al-Sheikh Khalil trudging through rubble, her make-shift shelter engulfed in flames around her, after an Israeli strike hit the school where she and her family had fled to escape the war raging around them in the Gaza Strip. Khalil, just five years old, survived. Her mother and five of her siblings did not make it out of the burning building. When she returned to the scene of the attack, she found her sister's abandoned flip-flop and broke down sobbing. "They all died after a rocket fell on top of them," she told CBS News' team in Gaza through tears. "The rocket came down and the place was on fire. The fire was raging. It burned my arm." "The fire filled the sky and the ground," she said. "I was asleep, but I came out from the fire. When I came out, I did not find my dad. They took me to the Baptist Hospital, and I saw dad on the way, in the ambulance. I saw him. He had many wounds on his face." "Dad is alive, and my brother Seraj is alive, and I am alive. That's all. But all my other siblings are dead," the little girl, held in the arms of her uncle, told CBS News. "I wish we could get together again." Ward Al-Sheikh Khalil, 5, a Palestinian girl who survived an Israeli strike on the Fahmi al-Jarjawi School in Gaza City where she was sheltering with her displaced family, is seen amid the ruins of the school the next day, held by her uncle, May 26, 2025. Anadolu/Getty The Israeli strike took place in the middle of the night. The Israel Defense Forces said the target was a Hamas command and control center inside the school building. Rescuers in the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Territory said the strike killed 33 people. European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen called the attack "abhorrent" on Tuesday during a call with Jordan's King Abdullah II, according to a readout of the call from the EU cited by the French news agency AFP. "The expansion of Israel's military operations in Gaza targeting civilian infrastructure, among them a school that served as a shelter for displaced Palestinian families, killing civilians, including children, is abhorrent," von der Leyen said, according to the EU. "The European Commission has always supported — and will continue to support — Israel's right to security and self-defense. But this escalation and disproportionate use of force against civilians cannot be justified under humanitarian and international law." Palestinians comb the area following an Israeli airstrike at dawn on a school in the al-Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City that killed more than 30 people on May 26, 2025. Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu/Getty Khalil's uncle, Iyad Mohamed el-Sheikh Khalil, holding his niece, told CBS News that his whole family had been displaced by the war, including his brother who had sought shelter with his wife and children at the school in Gaza City's Daraj neighborhood. When he heard reports of a strike on the school, he immediately tried to make contact. "Some pictures were released in the media. When I looked at them, I saw Ward with the Civil Defense. I immediately knew that it was my niece," he said. "When I came, I saw that the bodies of my brother's family were all charred and torn to pieces. It took a while to locate the body of her (Ward's) elder brother, Abed, so that we could bury them all together. It was a horrific scene." He worried about the lasting impact of living through such trauma on Gaza's children, including his niece. "When they come out of such bombardment and such war, how do you want children to feel? They must be in a terrible psychological state. Even we are in a terrible psychological state," he told CBS News. Ward al-Sheikh Jalil, who survived an Israeli attack on the Fahmi al-Jarjawi School in Gaza City, is seen in the ruins of the building, where she found slippers that belonged to her and her siblings, May 26, 2025. Anadolu/Getty Amid the bombings, Palestinians in Gaza also face a critical struggle to find food, after a nearly three-month-long Israeli blockade on all humanitarian goods entering the territory. Under pressure from its allies, including the U.S., Israel began allowing some humanitarian goods into Gaza last week, but aid agencies say it's not nearly enough to meet the needs of the enclave's roughly 2 million inhabitants. The newly established U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation also said it began distributing food on Monday. The GHF said Tuesday that it had distributed a total of about 462,000 meals over two days of operation. The United Nations and other aid organizations have objected to the group's methods, calling it a distraction. "Even when they bring aid, nothing reaches us," Islam Abu Taemia said while scavenging for food with her child in Gaza this week. "We're like stray dogs collecting food from trash. If we don't, we starve."
The National
26-05-2025
- General
- The National
Gaza families erased in a new wave of brutal Israeli strikes
Live updates: Follow the latest on Israel-Gaza Israel's war in Gaza has dragged on for 19 months, but the past three days have shown just how relentless it remains. Entire families have been wiped out in a wave of strikes attacking homes, schools, tents and more, despite a global outcry that has so far failed to pressure Israel into halting the war. Among the most harrowing Israeli attacks was the bombing of Fahmi Al Jarjawi school in the Al Daraj neighbourhood of central Gaza city, where hundreds of displaced families had sought shelter. 'The school was supposed to be a place of safety. Instead, it was turned into an inferno,' Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza's civil defence body, told The National. Medics announced the death of 40 people, mostly children and women. The Israeli missile strike ignited a massive blaze that swept through the school building and the tents pitched inside its grounds. Civil defence teams battled for hours to extinguish the flames. 'We heard desperate cries for help from people trapped alive inside the blaze,' Mr Basal said. 'But the fire was too intense. We couldn't get to them.' Hussein Muhaysin, a paramedic who rushed to the scene, was the first to rescue Ward Al Sheikh Khalil, a young girl pulled from the wreckage just before the flames reached her. 'She was moments away from death,' he told The National. 'When we pulled her out, she was in shock, silent, trembling, unable to comprehend what had just happened.' Little Ward survived. But her family did not. 'We couldn't bring ourselves to tell her that her entire family was killed in the bombing,' said Mr Muhaysin. 'Only her father survived, and he is now in critical condition,' he added. 'We see tragedy every day, but holding a child who has lost everything, who doesn't even know yet, that's a kind of pain no one can explain.' In the northern town of Jabalia, the Abdel Rabbo family suffered a similar fate. At dawn on Monday, Israeli warplanes struck their home with a massive missile, killing 19 people, most of them women and children. 'It was sudden,' Moumen Abdel Rabbo, 28, a relative who rushed to the scene, said. 'The house was completely flattened. Ambulances barely made it through to recover the wounded and the dead. Some bodies are still trapped under the rubble.' Even as family members tried to dig through debris, Israeli drones buzzed overhead, and surrounding areas continued to be shelled. 'How can we search for survivors under fire?' asked the relative. 'These were civilians, mothers, toddlers, elderly people. This wasn't a military target. It was our home.' The Israeli army claimed that it was hitting Hamas targets in both areas. But images and footage of the attacks showed dozens of Palestinian women and children dead or injured. Over the past three days, more than 75 people have been killed across various parts of the besieged territory, cut off from sufficient aid, leaving over two million people trapped between fire and famine. One of the most tragic killings in the past days was the story of Dr Alaa Al Najjar, a physician working at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in the south, who lost nine of her 10 children in a single Israeli air strike on their home while she was saving lives elsewhere. 'The Israeli army hit my uncle's house with one missile that didn't explode,' Suheir Al Najjar, a cousin, told the National. 'Then came a second missile, which reduced the house to ashes.' 'There was no time between the two strikes. They didn't want anyone to escape. It was a deliberate attempt to kill them all at once,' said Ms Al Najjar. 'My uncle and his wife are doctors. They have no links to armed groups. They spent the war treating the wounded, saving lives,' she said. 'This was a family, not a target.' Only the husband and one of the sons survived. Both remain in intensive care. The bodies of two of the nine children are still missing, buried beneath the rubble.
