Lullaby for a Palestinian child

11,500 dead Palestinian children. 17,000 separated from their families. 1.1 million in need of mental health support.

Into the fourth month of its ongoing genocide, Israel has killed over 11,500 children. More than 17,000 children, according to an Al Jazeera report, “have been left unaccompanied or separated from their families,” and nearly all children need mental health support, says UNICEF. That’s over 1.1 million children.

In the very early days of its barbarity, Israel wreaked such havoc in Gaza that its brutality gave rise to a whole new acronym unique to the besieged enclave: WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family). A Medecins Sans Frontieres doctor said, “And it is used not infrequently in the last three weeks. It was coined in the last three weeks.” She was speaking on November 1.

Videos of children shivering in fear after being subjected to Israeli brutality have become a constant theme over these four months.

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But the Zionist entity appears heartless in the face of such suffering of the most vulnerable. It can’t get enough of it. “We are looking for babies, but there is [sic] no babies left. Maybe I killed a girl; she was 12, but we’re looking for babies,” boasts an Israeli military thug on camera.

Israeli brutality against Palestinian children is nothing new. Since before its creation in Palestinian blood and suffering in 1948, Israel has been on a mission to eliminate the indigenous population. The immoral, inhuman entity that it is, Israel has never shied away from killing the innocent. When it doesn’t kill them, it kidnaps them and incarcerates them in its dungeons, torturing them and taking their formative years of life away from them.

Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz (1911-84) — one of the greats of Urdu literature — wrote a great deal about Palestinians and their suffering while he lived in Beirut toward the latter part of his life.

In 1980, he penned a poem for Palestinian children to console them in their unbearable suffering and grief. 44 years later, the poem remains as relevant as ever. It is an indictment of the global community’s indifference to — if not outright abandonment of — the Palestinian cause.

Originally in Urdu, here’s a transliterated version followed by its translation in English:

Falastini bacche ke liye lori
(Lullaby for a Palestinian child)

mat ro bachche
ro ro ke abhi
teri ammi ki aankh lagi hai
mat ro bachche
kuchh hi pahle
tere abba ne
apne gham se ruḳhsat li hai
mat ro bachche
tera bhai
apne khwaab ki titli peeche
door kahin pardes gaya hai
mat ro bachche
teri baaji ka
dola paraaey des gaya hai
mat ro bachche
tere aangan mein
murda sooraj nahlaa ke gaye hain
chandarma dafnaa ke gaye hain
mat ro bachche
ammi, abba, baaji, bhai
chaand aur sooraj
tu gar roegaa to ye sab
aur bhi tujh ko rulwaaenge
tu muskaaega to shaayad
saare ik din bhes badal kar
tujh se khelne laut aaenge

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Translation by Mustansir Dalvi:

don’t cry, child
your mother has just fallen asleep
weeping her heart out
don’t cry, child
moments ago, your father
took leave of his sorrows
don’t cry, child
your brother
is off to a foreign land
chasing the butterfly of his dream
don’t cry, child
the wedding palanquin
carrying your elder sister
has reached her matrimonial home
they’ve all gone
having washed the corpse of the sun
having buried the moon in the yard 
behind your home
don’t cry, child, for if you do
your mother, your father, your brother and sister,
the moon and the sun
will make you weep all the more
should you smile instead, then perhaps
they will all return to play with you one day
in some guise or the other

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Faiz on the Palestinians martyred in exile