Children Born in Gaza Over Last 3 Years Have No Memory of World Before Genocide

Por Tareq S. Hajjaj — Truthout

Israel’s genocide has narrowed Palestinian children’s expectations of life’s possibilities.

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When I left Gaza in 2024, after six months of living through genocide, I wanted one thing above all else: to spare my only child a life spent permanently at war. I did not want him to grow up believing that the whole world looked like Gaza.

But I left more than fifteen nieces and nephews behind. Many were still too young to understand the world they had been born into. They were learning what a home was, what a school was, what it meant to be alive, at the very moment those things were being destroyed around them.

I spent the next year and a half in Cairo. It took me a long time to learn how to inhabit ordinary life again. Whenever I saw a garden, a playground, a school, or children playing freely and safely in the street, I could not simply enjoy the sight. Gaza was always there, beneath it.

A garden brought back the rubble. A school brought back the children who no longer had one. Even safety became a reminder of those still denied it.

There was a comparison I could not stop making: why could children elsewhere grow up among their families and the people who loved them, while Gaza’s children remained trapped in this unending cycle of occupation, bombardment, destruction, genocide, and hunger? How could a child starve to death in a world with so much food?

I kept thinking about the children whose first understanding of life was taking shape inside the genocide. My niece, Elaf, was a year and a half old when I left. She was still at the beginning of everything.

Then her life changed entirely. A tent became her home. Missiles and bombs became the sounds she fell asleep to. Rubble shaped the landscape through which she was learning to see the world, and daily death shaped her first knowledge of life.

What could she know of the world beyond Gaza’s walls? What reason did she have to imagine that elsewhere, children slept without bombardment, lived in homes that stood, and went to schools built to shelter them?

I feared she would grow up believing that life in Gaza was simply life.

At first, I thought this was a danger facing mainly the youngest children: those born during the genocide, or too young to remember anything before it. But children who were two or three when it began, and are now five or six, are also learning to see the world as rubble upon rubble.

I hear it in their questions.

During a video call with my brother Osama, who has eight children, his six-year-old son, Muhammad, saw me sitting on a sofa in a brightly lit room.

“Uncle, how did your tent fit that sofa?” He asked. I did not know how to answer.

His question took me far from the room where I was sitting. Muhammad had lived in a beautiful home before the genocide. But now, when he looked at his uncle’s home, he was left wondering how such lavish furniture could fit into the only kind of home he had come to expect.

He had more questions. “Is your tent made of fabric pieces, or is it ready-made? Do you have a community kitchen that gives you food?”

These were simply the only frames of reference he had to try to understand my life, asking whether the arrangements that governed his own survival also governed mine. Shelter meant a tent. Food meant waiting for a meal to be distributed.

There was nothing strange about his questions. What was unbearable was how much sense they made within the life imposed on him.

The change reaches older children, too. My nieces, Amira and Heba, respectively 12 and 10, remember life before. Yet I can hear their expectations for ordinary life shrinking.

They no longer ask for much from a school. They hope it might be something more than tents pressed against one another: perhaps a wooden structure with a roof of corrugated steel sheets.

During one call with my brother, Amira sat beside him as we discussed my son starting school.

“Are your schools tents, or are they wooden?” she asked. Those were the possibilities she offered me. I asked what she liked about her own school.

“We leave our cramped tent and go to a bigger one,” she said. “We can play more freely. There is a little space where we can play.”

Her answer stayed with me. Even that small difference — being able to move from one cramped space to another slightly less cramped one — mattered.

Then I asked what she wished her school could have.

“The school is very hot in summer, and in winter the rain gets in,” she told me. “I wish there were a fan in summer and a heater in winter.”

She did not ask to return to a school like the one she had attended before the genocide. She asked for something that might make the tent more bearable.

I cannot know what she has forgotten, or what she has pushed aside because remembering it hurts. But I can hear what has disappeared from the wishes she shares with me.

The genocide has reached into children’s sense of what is possible. The tent remains, and the dream becomes to make it cooler. The rain comes through; the dream is for it to be a little warmer.

What frightens me is how familiar these conditions have become. Children have learned to move through them, to make room for play wherever they can, to ask for improvements within them. Their ability to adapt helps them get through the day. It also reveals the depth of what they have been forced to endure.

A child should not have to learn to dream in terms of a tent.

Arwa Jundiya, 23, has given birth to two daughters during the genocide. One is three years old. The other is one.

Her older daughter is growing up without knowing what it means to live in a house. She has never known the family home that shaped the childhoods of so many of us in Gaza: grandparents, parents, uncles, and their families living on different floors of the same building, sharing their days across one extended household.

Jundiya speaks of that life as something no longer available to her children. “The house was more than a shelter — it held the people among whom a child grew up.”

But there is another deprivation she returns to, something so small that its absence becomes almost impossible to comprehend. “My three-year-old daughter has never held a toy,” she said.

Poverty leaves little room for such purchases, Jundiya explains. “Toys are no longer readily available for parents to buy,” she explained. “My husband spends most of his time trying to secure food for them. The work of keeping them fed consumes what might once have gone toward making them happy.”

Jundiya tells me that her children spend their days lying inside the tent, with little to do and nowhere to go. There are precious few ways of breaking the monotony, and the stones and sand beside the tent are the only things they have to play with.

“Maybe in five years, my children will ask me about their lives,” she says. “I don’t know what I will tell them. I don’t know whether I will say that the whole world is like Gaza, or that Gaza is the only place where children face this fate.”

Her question returns me to the fear that made me leave.

Her children have little connection to the world outside. There is no internet available to them, no television inside the tent. They cannot see the places their mother might compare their lives to. Gaza is the world they know.

I think of my son, and of the life I wanted him to discover beyond war. Then I think of the children I left behind: Elaf falling asleep to bombs, Muhammad trying to fit my sofa inside a tent, Amira wishing for a fan, Arwa’s daughter reaching the age of three without ever holding a toy.

These are some of the ways the genocide continues inside childhood. It takes away the places where children live and learn, then narrows their understanding of what a home or a school can be. It deprives them of ordinary pleasures until those pleasures become things they have never known to ask for.

But the children are still curious. They still want to play. They still ask questions about the world. Yet the world they have been given offers them tents, hunger, and rubble as answers.

When Muhammad asked how my tent could fit a sofa, I heard a child trying to make sense of what he could see. I also heard how far we had allowed his expectations to fall.

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Tareq S. Hajjaj is the Gaza correspondent for Mondoweiss and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union. Follow him on Twitter/X at @Tareqshajjaj.

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Fonte: Truthout