They said today is Palestinian Child Day— as if dust hasn’t already etched every date into bone. As if the sky doesn’t keep its own calendar written in smoke and falling ceilings. As if calendars weren’t torn in half like limbs beneath homes that learned to whisper help before they learned to scream.
The children didn’t know. No one told them while they were digging through what was left of their mothers’ hair. No one mentioned it when the sky cleaved the bakery in two and turned the scent of bread into ash. No one handed out ribbons when the milk ran out, just silence so thick you could choke on it.
They say it’s a day for children— as if children haven’t already been tucked into body bags with no bedtime story, turned into rubble-stained lullabies, names spoken once and never again.
17,954 is not a number. It’s a graveyard’s worth of birthdays never sung. A scream folded so tightly into itself it becomes marrow. It’s what happens when the world learns to count corpses faster than it learns to weep.
274 babies too soft to scream, too sacred to survive. Still pink, still curled from the womb, some never even opened their eyes— but still, they were seen as threat enough to bury.
52 starved. 17 froze. Not because the world forgot, but because it remembered, and did not flinch. Because aid was called a risk, and hunger became a weapon, and grief, just another talking point.
They died with names you will never hear. Names spoken in broken lullabies, whispered into the collars of the dead. They died with cheeks still soft enough to kiss— but there are no lips left brave enough to reach them.
39,384 orphans. Children who no longer know what it feels like to be chosen first. Who dream of arms that no longer exist. Who fold themselves into corners of cold rooms trying to remember what it felt like to be held.
No one says goodnight. No one calls their names. They wake up like ghosts too stubborn to vanish, too forgotten to rest.
700 were taken. Snatched into silence. Still wearing the same pants with cartoon cats, shirts crusted with fear. Some haven’t spoken since the door slammed shut. 1,055 behind bars for the crime of growing up on the wrong side of genocide. And still the world debates what to call this.
And what of the ones who stayed? Stayed to become less and less of themselves— digits, data, a blur of bandages and blank stares. Eyes that will never blink again. Arms that cannot reach. Legs that remember running even as they vanish.
Every day, 15 more children are broken in ways no medicine knows how to touch. And they said—they said— this is their day. But they don’t want a fucking day. They want arms that lift, not drone strikes. They want their fathers back, not foreign sympathy. They want legs that carry them, not crutches flown in with press releases. They want to be more than a tragedy condensed for timelines.
They want their names to outlive the headlines. They want to be names, not numbers, not collateral, not silence wrapped in press jargon.
If there is anything left in this world worth saving, it is the children— not just the ones who still breathe, but the ones buried in shallow graves with stories still blooming in their throats. The ones behind steel bars dreaming in chains. The ones learning to draw drones before they learn the alphabet. The ones who stopped speaking because every word betrayed them.
They don’t need hashtags. They need your outrage. The kind that rattles glass. The kind that makes statues sweat. They need the rage you’ve hidden beneath your ribs to catch fire and do something.
They need you to stop pretending neutrality isn’t a weapon. To unlearn comfort. To finally feel the scream they’ve been swallowing for over 75 years.
Not a day. Not a post. A reckoning.
-Story leGaïe
Story Ember Legaie this is a poignant, tragic poem. A protest this poem. A protest the whole world should hear and so many should feel deeply ashamed and responsible.