Rahaf Abu Jazar, all of eight months old, froze to death in her family’s tent in Khan Yunis on Thursday morning as winter rains battered the Gaza Strip, with icy rainwater pouring through the flimsy plastic sheets covering the shelter of genocide survivors, flooding their ramshackle tents, and worsening their already catastrophic living conditions.
Over the past two winters, deprived of warm clothes, nutritious hot meals, and adequate shelter from chilly winds and unforgiving rains, dozens of children have frozen to death in the Gaza Strip. As the Israelis continue to blockade the entry of the agreed-upon aid necessary to alleviate the crushing misery of the Palestinians — who have survived over two years of non-stop bombings and every form of deprivation — fear is growing that widespread malnutrition, combined with worsening weather conditions, will lead to another winter of multiple child deaths.
Rahaf, the young girl who never knew anything but genocide, has become the latest victim of the Western- and Arab-backed Israeli extermination of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza — a genocide that continues unabated despite Western and Arab leaders posing in front of a grotesque sign reading “PEACE 2025” and announcing, with shameless smiles, that peace has come to the besieged Strip after two years of relentless slaughter, with victims whom no one can accurately count and thousands still rotting beneath the rubble of their destroyed homes.
But the truth remains that no peace has come to Gaza. The Israelis have killed nearly 400 people just over the last two months, including by running over a child with a tank, and continue to deny the Palestinians the means to rebuild their lives. Now that the genocide survivors are suffering due to the inclement weather, the Israelis are busy celebrating. “Not a single tent will remain… and I have no problem if people do not survive there either,” weather forecaster Tzachi Peleg declared on an Israeli channel.
A storm hit Palestine on Wednesday, bringing with it heavy rains and fierce winds, and these conditions are expected to last at least until Friday. In the absence of new tents, mobile homes, and building materials — all of which the Israelis continue to block from entering Gaza — the Palestinians are enduring unforgiving winter.
Newborns and children will again be paying with their lives due to the severe weather conditions and the engineered helplessness of their parents. “In Gaza’s hospitals, I met several newborns who weighed less than 1 kilogram, their tiny chests heaving with the effort of staying alive,” UNICEF’s Tess Ingram said in a press briefing on Tuesday. “Low birth weight infants are about 20 times more likely to die than infants of normal weight. They need special care, which many of the hospitals in Gaza have struggled to provide due to the destruction of the health system, the death and displacement of staff, and impediments by Israeli authorities that prevented some essential medical supplies from entering the Strip.”
The deprivation imposed by the Israelis is taking a particularly severe toll on the pregnant women of Gaza — and this distress is translating into vulnerable newborns. “[W]e continue treating them [pregnant women] in high numbers. In October alone, we admitted 8,300 pregnant and breastfeeding women for treatment for acute malnutrition – about 270 a day – in a place where there was no discernible malnutrition among this group before October 2023,” Ingram added. “This pattern is a grave warning and will likely result in low birth weight babies being born in Gaza for months to come.”
The impact of impoverishment is evident everywhere in the besieged enclave and is silently stalking the malnourished infants. Ingram: “I have spent many months in Gaza over the past two years, and I see and hear the generational impacts of the conflict on mothers and their infants almost every day; in hospitals, nutrition clinics and family tents. It is less visible than blood or injury, but it is ubiquitous. It is everywhere.”
Forced by circumstances to grow before their years, the children in Gaza are sharing the load of their parents in easing the pain of their younger siblings as the world continues to abandon them while they are being exterminated in broad daylight for more than 26 months without a break.
“No child should lie awake all night freezing in sewage-sodden bedding,” Ahmad Alhendawi, regional director for Save the Children, said on Wednesday. “This is unconscionable. What Palestinian children in Gaza need immediately is tents including tent poles, shelter, warm clothes, blankets and bedding as well as a major investment in repairing the damaged sanitation system.
“Israel, as the occupying power, is obliged to ensure the humanitarian needs of the occupied population are met. Israeli authorities must lift the siege and ensure all border crossings are open and fully operational in both ways, aid restrictions reduced, and services resumed.”
The Israelis, however, are in no mood to listen to anyone as they put the final touches to their Gaza extermination plan in the garb of a supposed “ceasefire.”
Instead of holding the Israelis accountable for trashing the terms of the “ceasefire” deal ever since it was agreed upon, American government officials are lying outright on behalf of the Jewish supremacists, shielding them from any accountability as they carry out their genocidal plans.
Furthermore, according to a Reuters report, “Trump administration officials have held advanced discussions on hitting U.N. Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA with terrorism-related sanctions.”
UNRWA has been a lifeline for the Palestinians since its inception in 1949, providing relief materials, running schools, and offering essential health and social services in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As a result, the Israelis have been running a relentless campaign to malign the UN agency with the aim of outlawing it and further accelerating the ordeal of the Palestinians. By acquiescing, the US is helping the Israelis achieve another ghastly objective.
Meanwhile, the authorities in Gaza are calling on the world to respond “to save the catastrophic humanitarian reality” in the besieged enclave. But it is unlikely their cries, which have been unanswered over the past 26 months, will be heeded now. In the face of this excruciating abandonment of the long-suffering Palestinian people, only a divine miracle can now save more children from going the way of Rahaf Abu Jazar. This wanton disregard for the lives of the most vulnerable and innocent is a stain on all of us.
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The soul breaking suffering of the Palestinians and the unfathomable cruelty of the Israeli Genocide Forces is just simply incomprehensible.
A particularly cruel form of genocide, freezing people to death. I remember the Nazis used to do this.
The world has failed the children of Palestine. They are just going to look away as they stand by doing business deals with the Zionist entity. We are all responsible for this holocaust.