World should be on the side of Gaza’s children

A powerful and compelling child’s-eye view of life in Gaza over a period of nine months was broadcast in a documentary last month. It received rave reviews, even from Britain’s right-wing media. This was before a major outcry and anti-Palestinian pile-on forced the BBC to remove it from its streaming service.

“Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone” was jointly fronted by a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, Abdallah Alyazouri. It turned out that he also happened to be the son of the deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas administration governing Gaza — a technocrat. The ensuing hullabaloo brought unwelcome interventions from the British prime minister and the culture secretary, as well as Israeli officials, including the extreme right-wing ambassador to the UK, who opposes a Palestinian state.

Few critics bothered to watch the documentary. One commentator vented his fury and proclaimed that not only had he not watched it, but he also was not going to. If he had bothered, he would have heard plenty to counter the vicious anti-Palestinian myth that this was Hamas propaganda. Many Palestinians made explicitly anti-Hamas statements. A Palestinian woman told the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar: “God damn you, Sinwar.” Zakara, 11, one of the child narrators, also castigated Hamas: “They caused all this misery.”

The underlying reason for the anti-Palestinian backlash was that the documentary dared to do something that so many in the political and media classes refuse to do — humanize Palestinians, particularly children. For those who support their ethnic cleansing or genocide in Gaza, this was a disaster.

For them, Palestinians in Gaza should be mere numbers, compared to vermin, not real humans with hopes, fears and dreams. The story of the young Palestinian girl who became a TikTok celebrity thanks to her cooking show is precisely the sort of thing that Israeli leaders do not want to reach the outside world. It is one reason Israel continues to prevent international journalists from entering Gaza, even during a “ceasefire.”

This BBC documentary saga highlighted a painful reality — that most of the world’s ruling classes do not care about the lives of Palestinian children in Gaza.

One question I asked the day the documentary was pulled was: What was the BBC doing to safeguard the three Palestinian children it had filmed in the documentary? The BBC has a major duty of care toward these children. Abdallah claimed in an interview that the BBC had not been in contact. Imagine this 13-year-old thinking he was going to be telling his story to the world, only for the documentary not only to be pulled, but for him then to be subjected to such hostile aggression.

All Palestinian children in Gaza are traumatized. Abdallah and all those his age have already experienced four major Israeli wars on the Strip.

Yet, over the last 16 months, Palestinian children, as well as adults, have endured pain and horror the likes of which nobody should have to experience. Israel has killed about 18,000 children. Many of the 110,000 Palestinians injured are children, given that nearly half the Strip’s population is under 18. According to the UN, “Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history.” Some have suffered brain injuries from explosions. Many have lost key members of their families, in some cases all of them. In medical circles, many refer to a sadly all-too-frequent scenario, “WCNSF” (wounded child, no surviving family).

Palestinian children in Gaza have the highest levels of child malnutrition in the world, which will inevitably lead to stunting.

Chris Doyle

On top of this, Palestinian children in Gaza have the highest levels of child malnutrition in the world, which will inevitably lead to stunting in younger children. All of this is a direct result of the policies of the Israeli government.

But what prospects do Palestinian children in Gaza have? Education for 660,000 of them has come to a grinding halt since Oct. 7, 2023. Many had already lost two years of their schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the UN, 90 percent of schools have been damaged or destroyed. Israel has bombed all Gaza’s universities. The territory is closed off from the world, as it has been pretty consistently since 2007.

And these children do hear the news. They know Israel reimposed a full blockade on Gaza just as Ramadan was starting. They know the US president is encouraging the clearing out of Gaza’s Palestinian population. They know that Israel is intending to resume full military operations, with references to unleashing hell, as if Gaza was not already a place fit for Hades.

The world should be on the side of Palestinian children, willing to hear their stories and to help in any way possible, given the genocide and the conditions Israel has imposed on Gaza. The BBC should have stood up to these powerful anti-Palestinian forces. It should have determined that telling the children’s stories was more important than who the father of one of the children was. This situation is part of the wider malaise of dehumanization and anti-Arab racism that needs to be tackled if there is to be any hope of a real and lasting peace.

• Chris Doyle is director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding in London. X: @Doylech