Imagine 72,264 children being murdered in less than 100 days.

If we compare Gaza to Canada, we get a local sense of the breadth of the destruction

Child’s toy in the rubble in Palestine — photo taken in 2021 by MSF

The headline in the Globe and Mail reads: One Percent of Children in Gaza Have Been Killed.

Or, it should read that. If the Globe deemed children newsworthy, there would be an article that had this as a headline. But of the 71 articles tagged Israel-Hamas at the the Globe and Mail’s website since mid-December, not one of them has the word “child” in the headline.

Media and politicians alike have worked overtime to make us think that Israel’s war is against Hamas. That might be what we’re calling it and that might be the justification for the slaughter that Israel has advanced, but it is, above all, a war against children.

“GAZA: 10,000 children killed in nearly 100 days of war” reads the headline from Save the Children.

10,000 children in nearly 100 days of war.

10,000 babies, toddlers, school children and teenagers in nearly 100 days of war.

Children, or as Israeli politician Ayelet Shaked famously called them, “little snakes.”

Where Justin Trudeau has tweeted about Hamas 57 times since October 7, he has said nothing about children who have been the biggest victims in this war.

Israel was in The Hague this morning, denying that murdering 1% of a population’s children in less than 100 days is tantamount to eventual genocide. That it’s just collateral damage for their obsession with murdering everyone who they say might be Hamas.

If any country had attacked that many Canadian children, we would be grappling with the murder of 72,264 children in less than 100 days.

What evil can justify this kind of destruction? These children are collateral damage not because Israel has been indescriminatly killing Palestinians but because Hamas uses children as objects of war. CIJA, the group working hardest to sanitize Israel’s ethnic cleansing for a Canadian audience shows us how this propaganda works. Here is one of their tweets in November (though the only children they have said they care about on Twitter is a child hostage of Hamas).

With the murder of more than 10,000 children on their hands, I’m not sure that we can trust Israeli soldiers to tell us what they are finding underneath children’s beds. But for CIJA, the murder of so many children isn’t condemnable — it’s actually part of the game and they are gleefully cheerleading from the sidelines.

As Gaza hit this gruesome landmark, the UK and the US dropped more than 100 munitions on Yemen in, as UK PM Rushi Sunak told journalists, “in self defense.” This bombing campaign is going to externalize Israel’s war on Gaza and murder even more children.

Yemen’s civil war had devestating impacts on Yemeni children and now, the West is dropping bombs on them. Unicef estimated that more than 11,000* Yemeni children died or were injured during the civil war. That was a humanitarian crisis. Canada is implicated in both instances of violence — as brokers of weapons that were used to murder in Yemen and as members of the coalition that started bombing Yemen last night.

Canadians politicians, mostly cowards, have said very little about the horrors that have been wrought on children since October 7. Before Israel started it’s current campaign, it was obvious and highly publicized that a campaign against Gaza would devestate its children and, well, here we are.

My father always said that he’d support a war only after the politicians who support it send their children off to fight in it first. Let us see their personal committment to war. There’s wisdom in that. But with the benefit of live coverage, live streaming and modern technology, we can see that war isn’t even as bad as potentially losing a son or daughter as a soldier. It’s as bad as children picking up the limbs of their siblings and placing them in a pile together, watching their parents be murdered or raped by soldiers, hiding inside cupboards and piles and piles of tiny white body bags.

It’s life-long trauma and life-long disbility on the lucky side of the ledger.

CIJA wants us to support Israel? Trudeau wants us to support Israel? Maybe — but only after they send their children to be exploded by an Israeli shell to at least experience the total fucking hell that they’re loudly and proudly supporting.

*If we compare Yemen’s population of 32 million people to Gaza’s 1.7 million, the number of child casualties is even more horrifying. Yemen’s count of 11,000 million is injured and killed — we don’t have the number of how many children in Gaza have been injured.

If we compare the deathtoll to Ukraine (population 43 million), a war that is rounding its second year, there have been some 1800 children killed or wounded there.