This Was the Year We Learned What a Child Looks Like Without Half His Head
Fatima Bhutto writes that in its genocidal war in Gaza, Israel has – with dangerous consequences – changed the protocols of war.
This essay is part of Zeteo’s special content marking one year since the attacks on Oct. 7 and the genocidal war in Gaza that has followed.
One evening in August, I was in the kitchen looking at my phone when on X, in a blur of scrolling, I thought I saw a child with half his head blown off on my feed. In a panic, I scrolled past the image, my heart pounding. What had I just seen? There had been another massacre in Gaza, another slaughter by the Israeli military. It was 10 months into the genocide.
I didn’t want to see the image, but I moved through my feed to try to understand what had just happened when I saw it again. A boy, half his head a tumble of light brown curls; the other half of his head decimated, missing, gone. He was being carried by his father; his father who thought he could still save his boy, his son, his darling child. Though over these interminably cruel months, I have seen premature babies gasping for oxygen in incubators that are about to be powered off, a beheaded baby held in the air by his howling father, and women weeping into the shrouds of their children, I burst into tears. It was the most terrifying thing I have ever seen.
It has been one year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the old world order is gone, obliterated by Israel, which has ushered us into something nightmarish and unimaginable. Before this year, I could never have imagined that I would know what a toddler looks like without half his head. But Israel and its backers, who have empowered it to act with total impunity, have changed more than just our nightmares – they have changed with dire and dangerous consequences the protocols of war. You may not care about Palestinians, but tomorrow these tactics may be visited on your city, on your people, with you as the victims.
Israel is replicating its playbook in Lebanon as we speak – assassinating journalists in their homes, reportedly bombing ambulances, and killing children. When it remotely detonated 3,000 pagers in an act of mass terrorism, Israel reportedly sent messages so that their victims would hold them close to their faces when they exploded, ensuring death or severe injuries. Western papers like the New York Times could barely contain their teenage-like glee over Israel’s murderous technology, praising its innovation and daring as though this were an action movie where the serial killer gets craftier with every kill. Lincoln Jopp, a Conservative MP in the UK, insisted we “look on in awe” at Israel’s “phenomenal” attack. No matter that the pagers exploded in grocery stores, in people's homes, and even in a pediatrician's office as the doctor was examining a 10-day-old baby. Dozens of people, including two children, were killed when Israel detonated the pagers and other devices over two days. The maiming and murdering of newborns and children – this is Israel’s specialty.
Not Ordinary Acts of War
In Gaza, Israel has killed more UN workers since Oct. 7 of last year than have been targeted at any point in their entire history. An unprecedented number of aid workers have been hunted down and murdered.
Israel has killed more than 120 Palestinian journalists and media workers – making the war the most deadly single conflict in modern history. Often, the families of journalists were also stalked and exterminated. Al Jazeera’s Wael Al Dahdouh’s wife, son, daughter, and one-and-a-half-year-old grandson were killed when their home was bombed by the Israeli military. Israel killed another one of his sons later. On Sunday, 20-year-old journalist Hassan Hamad was murdered; what was left of his body fit in a shoe box. Before he was killed, he had been reportedly threatened by an Israeli officer. “Listen, if you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next,” the WhatsApp message read, ordering to cease filming in Gaza “…this is your last warning.” These are not ordinary acts of war.
Doctors, healthcare workers, and paramedics have been targeted, abducted, tortured, and killed. The Israeli military bombed or raided 32 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza – targeting anything that sustains life. Only 17 hospitals are functioning partially. Israel blew up every single university and hundreds of schools and UN shelters. Genocide is too light a word for what Israel has wrought in Gaza. Israel has exceeded the confines of our language with its brutality and terror. One public health expert estimates the death toll from Israel’s genocide in Gaza could be as high as 335,000 people by the end of the year.
Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Israel kills a child every 10 minutes, the UN has estimated. Today, Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees on Earth. Genocide is not the right word; it does not convey the evil of purposely targeting children. “No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the world’s best snipers,” Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an American doctor, recently charged. “And they’re dead-center shots.” Over 710 newborns have been killed – taken by Israel before their lives even began.
Leave aside, if you can, the slaying of journalists and poets and teachers and medics, and just look at the children. A recent Oxfam report says that Israel has killed more Palestinian children in this one year than Russia has killed civilians in the entirety of the Ukrainian war so far. This is the wholesale slaughter of children.
There is no end to Israel’s horror. Israel has allowed infectious diseases as deadly as polio to be reintroduced into Gaza – where it was previously eradicated – with no care for global health. Just the first two months of Israel’s genocide saw it release at least 281,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – the annual footprint of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations in just 60 days.
These are the most heinous of war crimes. To kill the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut, Israel leveled six residential apartment buildings with reportedly several 2,000 lb bombs in a tightly packed civilian neighborhood. President Joe Biden, whose clear disregard for the Palestinians has no equal among his predecessors, called this “a measure of justice.” One million Lebanese have been displaced by Israel’s ferocious carpet bombing in less than a week.
Israel has carried out more than 17,000 attacks on five countries since Oct. 7, according to Al Jazeera. It is no wonder that so many people say that this one tiny state has made the entire world unsafe.
But it’s not just Israel. Before the end of August, Biden’s administration had completed its 500th delivery of weapons to Israel since October. In June, officials said the US had reportedly given $6.5 billion in assistance to Israel since the war began. At the start of Israel's assault on Lebanon, the Biden administration rewarded the country with an additional $8.7 billion. The United States is not complicit in Israel’s butchery; it is an equal partner and will forever be remembered as such across the Global South. Its standing in the Middle East will never recover.
Time Is Israel’s Enemy
“We have yet to understand,” the writer James Baldwin said, “that if I am starving, you are in danger.” Oct. 7 shattered the false myth that Israel could live complacently, safely, with rights for themselves and absolutely nothing for the Palestinians – not rights, nor freedom, not even the right to eat, as Gazan’s calorie intake was strictly monitored by Israel, keeping them just above starvation long before 2023. And there is so much more that Israel still does not seem to understand. Flattening Gaza, carpet bombing Lebanon, bombarding Hodeidah, Yemen’s main humanitarian port, or assassinating the head of Hamas on Iran’s sovereign soil does not impress Israel’s strength on the world. On the contrary, it is evidence of its patent weakness.
Israel – and the US – have threatened International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan to back off his investigations of genocide. In response to a separate genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, Netanyahu sneered, “Nobody will stop us.” Those who have tried to stop them – Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen – have paid fatally for their interventions, but Netanyahu is wrong. Time is Israel’s enemy. People fighting for their homes never fail; it is the colonizer who is always vanquished. It is simply a matter of time. The native has nowhere else to go and nothing to lose. You can pour as many troops or guns or money against them. Those troops can leave, but the people fighting for their homes cannot. This is blazingly evident given that Israel’s army, like so many criminal and terror outfits around the world, is made up of tens of thousands of foreign fighters – nationals or recent immigrants from France, England, the US, India, and beyond. As former Communist leader Ho Chi Minh said when fighting the French and Americans in Vietnam, “You can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose, and I will win.”
One year later, Israel has been thoroughly morally delegitimized in the world. No man or woman of heart or conscience can stand by it. Israel is isolated and will have brought about a collapse not just of the international order but also of the Western world. Through its relentless terror over the last year, it has made Palestine the cause of free human beings in the world. Authoritarian governments and mendacious media are Israel’s allies, but Palestine has the hearts and solidarity of the people. No amount of weaponry can defeat that.
Read more of Zeteo’s special content marking Oct. 7:
Missing half their head, missing their whole head, missing their body, missing their legs. I scream in my sleep these days.
Thank you Fatima Bhutto and Mehdi Hasan for brining to light the barbarism of the West.