The Starving Children of Gaza

As the human and humanitarian tragedy that is Gaza keeps unfolding before our eyes, no one with any sense of decency or compassion can remain silent.

This includes those of us who support Israel’s right to defend itself and to eliminate the existential threat to its existence represented by Hamas.

But that right of self-defence, that right to protect its citizens from terrorist savagery, cannot be exercised, must not be exercised by inflicting horrendous suffering on the innocent, and that is what children, all children, are.

“My brother was only five years old // Adonai
our mother taught him // to love You
that You // would not let him stumble //
would not let him fall”

The hundreds of rabbis who have called publicly on Prime Minister Netanyahu to “stop at once the use and threat of starvation as a weapon of war” speak for humankind as a whole.

President Trump made what may well be the understatement of the year when he told reporters on Monday that the children in Gaza “look very hungry,” adding that what is happening to these children is “real starvation stuff.”

And so, because none of us have the right to remain silent at this hour in history, I want to add one more voice, my voice, to the ever-growing global chorus demanding an end to the suffering with my poem, “the child,” that forms part of the coda of my book, Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).

I do so in the hope that it might serve as a reminder that every child anywhere and everywhere in the world was created in a divine image, that “the child/israeli child/palestinian child/jewish child/muslim child/is innocent/always was/always will be/innocent,” and that the suffering and death of a child anywhere and everywhere, including in Gaza, is the death and destruction of the purest manifestation of God, of Adonai, of Allah:

the child

murdered children
emaciated children
must awaken us
before it is too late
to who we are
to why we are

the starving child
in the warsaw ghetto
bialystok ghetto
będzin ghetto
was created
in the same divine image
by the same God
the same Adonai
the same Allah
as the starving child
in gaza city
khan younis
rafah

the dead child
in gaza city
khan younis
rafah
is cried over
with the same tears
by the same God
the same Allah
the same Adonai
as the dead child
in kfar aza
nahal oz
be’eri

the child
israeli child
palestinian child
jewish child
muslim child
is innocent
always was
always will be
innocent

and it is
for the not yet dead child
palestinian child
israeli child
muslim child
jewish child
that the killing must end
the war must end
the terror must end
the hatred must end

we cannot erase
the horrors of october 7
we cannot erase
the images of shrouded infants
in the rubble of bombed hospitals

but despite unending anguish
Adonai’s anguish
Allah’s anguish
our anguish
israelis and palestinians
muslims and jews
must now look into the sunrise
to create a beginning of hope
however elusive
if not for themselves
if not for ourselves
then for the child
the Israeli child
the palestinian child
the jewish child

Menachem Z. Rosensaft teaches about the law of genocide at the law schools of Cornell and Columbia universities. He is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress and the author of Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).