The author is an emergency pediatrician and associate professor in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University. He is involved in the Let’s Take Care of Social Justice collective and he wrote No more indigenous children snatched away (Lux publisher).
At the end of my first year of medicine, I did a voluntary internship in a pediatric hospital in Rabat. With a little naivety, but above all a Western arrogance, I believed that we would be useful there. There, my four classmates and I toured the newborns admitted to intensive care with the medical team every morning. As this was our first clinical exposure, I quickly realized that we weren’t really bringing any relevant expertise to the table.
In fact, as is often the case with this type of “global health” internship, we were the main beneficiaries: I will never forget the time we were able to spend with the less critical babies. It was the first time in my adult life that I was confronted not only with extreme poverty, but with such glaring disparities between the richest and the poorest.
During an outing near a souk in Fez, we came across a few children begging in the street. One of these children particularly struck me because of her striking resemblance to my younger sister. I then realized a truth as simple as it was devastating: if not for the arbitrary nature of birthplace, this little girl could have been my sister.
I often think of this little girl when thinking of the children—our children—across the world who are born into conditions over which they (and often their families) have no control. Living conditions which are in fact dependent on a capitalist economic system weighed down by colonial, racist or patriarchal reflexes — all structural determinants of health. A system of global apartheid, in short, in which 5 million children under the age of five died in 2020 mainly from preventable or treatable causes while 45 million children suffered from acute malnutrition and the number of children displaced by conflict and violence increased from around 20.6 million in 2010 to 43.3 million in 2022, according to UNICEF.
These distressing data are dizzying. Let’s be clear: no child should suffer or die from conditions for which they are not responsible. The lack of concrete and concerted action on these issues is sometimes justified by the fact that the realities of these children seem too far from ours. However, they are intimately linked: the exploitation of lands and people, here and elsewhere, is what enables our Western way of life. Greta Thunberg summed it up well during COP24 in 2018: “It is the suffering of the greatest number that pays for the luxury of the fewest. »
A cemetery for thousands of children
Following the deplorable loss of Israeli lives, including children, during Hamas’ surprise offensive on October 7 (for which the influential Israeli newspaper Haaretz held Benjamin Netanyahu as the main responsible in an editorial), we are witnessing live the acceleration of a “serious risk of genocide in Palestine”, according to the UN. The governments of Quebec and Canada see the situation deteriorating and refuse to intervene with Israel to put an end to the carnage.
We should not be surprised: this “war” is often presented as a religious “conflict” between Muslims and Jews when the main issue is geopolitical.
According to Martin Lukacs, former journalist for The Guardian and editor-in-chief of The Breach, Israel and Canada share the values specific to occupation colonialism. In a video clip published last week, he explains that “since the creation of Israel, Canada has supported American interests in the Middle East: it has supported a strong client state to help control the region’s oil and maintain Arab nationalism under control. All this through trade agreements, unwavering diplomatic support and the sale of military equipment from Canada.
Today, Palestinian children, who make up almost half of the population of 2.2 million people already under siege in the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated regions in the world and described as “unlivable” in 2018, pay the price.
On November 7, Defense for Children International–Palestine reported that the Israeli army killed twice as many Palestinian children in Gaza in the first 30 days of its operation Iron Swords than the total number of Palestinian children killed in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. Not to mention more than a thousand children who are missing, most of whom died under the rubble of destroyed buildings. According to the NGO, this amounts to 180 Palestinian children dying per day — one child every eight minutes, a rate that surpasses child deaths in other conflicts, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and the Yemen.
Even excluding missing children, the NGO Save the Children reported that the number of children killed in the Gaza Strip during the first three weeks of bombing exceeded the annual number of children killed in conflict zones. worldwide every year since 2019. Gaza has become “a cemetery for thousands of children” and “a veritable hell for everyone else”, according to UNICEF. Moreover, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs said last week that the death toll could be higher than that provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is under the control of Hamas.
Meanwhile, Gaza’s health system has collapsed under the weight of Israeli bombing and blockade.
Last week, Nebal Farsakh, spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent, explained that there is no way to safely evacuate babies from incubators: “Evacuating them is killing them. » Agence France-Presse reported this weekend that two babies in intensive care died after their incubators stopped working due to lack of electricity. UNICEF announced that al-Rantissi and al-Nasr children’s hospitals were damaged during Israeli army offensives and that medical care there has almost ceased.
Alone and without family
On the other hand, according to the World Health Organization, the rapid spread of infectious diseases has already begun, given the context of high population density, the blockade imposed by Israel on fuel, water and food, and the destruction of sanitation systems.
Faris Al-Jawad, head of communications at Doctors Without Borders (MSF), explained to ABC News last week that the vast majority of patients seen by his teams in hospitals around Gaza are children who arrive alone: “They scream for their parents, they scream for their family. There is no one for them. »
In an interview with the BBC, her MSF colleague, pediatric intensivist Tanya Haj-Hassan, revealed that medical teams had created a new acronym to describe this particular type of victim of Israel’s bombing: WCNSF, for “ wounded child, no surviving family » (“injured child, with no remaining family”). She launched a heartfelt cry for a truce, attacking the idea of a “humanitarian pause” promoted in particular by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “Do you take a pause to feed and hydrate a population before killing it? »
In his book The Colors of Jews, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, the late lesbian and feminist activist and founder of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, wrote: “Solidarity is the political version of love. » The last few weeks have shown that a good number of Quebecers and Canadians demonstrate this solidarity-love towards the Palestinian people, especially children.
On the other hand, Prime Ministers Legault and Trudeau are not even capable of uttering three words – ceasefire – in order to put an end to a war waged against Palestinian children for too long. Here, their silence is deafening. There, this silence kills.