How do I mourn the killings of over 11,000 children?

Editor’s note: The following text is a version of a speech given by Incé Husain during a vigil for Gaza’s children on the evening of December 30, 2023 outside the New Brunswick Legislature in Fredericton. 

I have been unable to answer this question. I am language-less when it comes to the children of Gaza. “Mourn” is not sufficient a word. “Grief” is not sufficient a word. “Horror” is not sufficient a word. These terms are too casual to begin to document the effects of genocide.

I am not Palestinian. But in the last three months, my associations with life have been rewritten to make room for Gaza’s children.

I cannot look at a house without seeing a child being forcibly displaced. I cannot look at a road without seeing children clinging to their mothers and outrunning bombs. I cannot find solace in my childhood memories without imagining their childhoods, bloodstained and bounded by illegal occupation and their inherited resilience. Every breath I take lives in this split screen. At times it is so overpowering that I feel terror for my own life.

This is how I’ve come to internalize the arbitrariness of violence, that the separation between me and a child in Gaza is the accident of birth. This is how I mourn over 11,000 infants and children: to be separated by an accident is so empty that our pain becomes instinctively tied.

This is what everyone should internalize. We are all separated by nothing but an accident. Once this is learned, it is impossible to forget the children of Gaza for a second.

The UN calls Gaza “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.” The UN calls Gaza “a graveyard for children.”

One child is killed every 10 minutes. 11,422 Palestinian children have been killed since October 7.

1,000 Palestinian children have lost one or both their legs. Over 24,000 Palestinian children have lost one or both parents.

 640,000 Palestinian children have had their homes destroyed or damaged.

Every Palestinian child faces starvation and epidemic when they do not face bombs.

We have all heard these stats. We have all borne witness to this violence and the shameful paralysis of our Canadian government in its wake.

But who are these children of Gaza? Who is it that I mourn? They are not statistics. They are not numbers. They are not ordinary children.

I return repeatedly to the voice of one child that I listen to when I need the strength to merely bear witness. This child looks about seven years old. This child does not struggle to look at the news, struggle to open her eyes, struggle to work, ricochet through nightmares from the safety of her home, as I do. She is the news. She lives the nightmares. She stands in the heart of violence with her spine straight.

“I will remain steadfast on my land,” she says. “Until the last blood drop in my soul. Until my last breath. Until I lose my breath, get suffocated and die. Then I will be buried in my land. Buried under the house plants. I want to be planted in my land. I will not leave. We will remain steadfast here. Palestine’s children don’t abandon her. My blood is Palestinian blood.”

Let this sink in. This is the voice of a child facing genocide. These children teach life. They know that their existence is an unflinching, non-negotiable act of resistance.

May we learn to have their conviction and dignity. May we learn from them the resistance they ask of us.

Incé Husain is a neuroscience student based in London, Ontario. She writes for the NB Media Co-op, and pursues local stories independently at The Unprecedented Times.