Names of more than 21,600 children killed in Gaza Strip read aloud by New Brunswick activists

Volunteers gathered in Saint John recently to read out the names of more than 21,600 children killed during Israel’s prolonged assault on the Gaza Strip.

The vigil spanned five days, an indication of the immense human toll of a military campaign widely condemned as a genocide.

The reading took place outdoors at the University of New Brunswick’s Saint John campus.

People who took part included Saint John resident Helmi Alfarra, who was born and raised in the Gaza Strip.

“I lost 280 members of my family in this genocide, including my uncle and his nine children,” Alfarra wrote in a message to the NB Media Co-op.

“There are also many others who are second- and third-degree cousins,” said Alfarra, a researcher at UNB and of the organizers of the vigil. “In the ‘Say Their Names’ list there were 103 from my family, including my cousins.”

He described the painful experience of hearing the names of relatives whose photos still appear in his timeline on Facebook, posted by their mother on special occasions.

“I can see them in those photos wearing their school uniforms and carrying their school backpacks. I see them wearing their holiday clothes. I can see the happiness in their eyes,” he continued.

“But there is also something I could never have imagined: that one day, they would be gone because of a single Israeli bombing.”

About 40 volunteers read out the Palestinian children’s names between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. daily, according to Prof. Jeff Houlahan, another organizer.

The reading began on Labour Day and continued until around 3:45 p.m on Friday, Sept. 11.

Hundreds of names written in red, green and black against a white banner — the colours of the Palestinian flag — were displayed among the trees in the university quad, a video from the scene shows.

Volunteers set up a microphone with a loudspeaker and read from a book of names, written in English and Arabic, which rested on a music stand. Images of the children were placed on the ground, along with tiny pairs of children’s shoes.

Child fatalities in the Gaza Strip reached 21,638 between Oct. 7, 2023 and May 7, 2026, according to a World Health Organization dashboard citing data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health. That’s nearly 30 per cent of the total death toll, which reached 72,835 during that time.

Last year, when the child death toll reached 20,000, the charity Save the Children said that figure represented two per cent of Gaza’s child population.

The five-day vigil was organized by Palestine Vivre Saint John, Labour 4 Palestine Saint John, and Palestine Solidarity Saint John.

Seven people from Citizens for Peace and Central United Church travelled from Moncton to take part in the event, according to Carol Scott, one of the participants.

There was no media coverage, Houlahan said.

Every MP and MLA in the province was invited to attend, along with Mayor Donna Reardon and all members of Saint John city council, along with UNB’s board of governors and senior administrators, according to Houlahan.

“None of the MLAs, none of the MPs, none of the city council, none of the board of governors, none of the senior admin from the university even responded, let alone accepted the invitation,” Houlahan said.

The Mayor of Saint John acknowledged the vigil on Monday in a Facebook post.

“Irrespective of one’s views regarding the war in Gaza, the tragic plight of the children is unacceptable and represents a humanitarian crisis as stated in a recent United Nations report,” Reardon said, noting recent casualty figures that include more than 44,000 injured children.

“There was a vigil at UNB to honour and remember child victims and while this is centred around one large group let us please remember, regardless of political views, there are many other innocent civilian victims in other disputes happening around the world right now who have lost their lives and their futures to war.”

The post generated more than 230 comments, with some social media users praising the mayor and others criticizing her stance. The mayor’s office didn’t immediately respond to an interview request on Friday.

Silence about the Palestinian cause among most politicians over the past three years, at least in New Brunswick, may signal that it remains a third rail in some quarters, despite evidence of growing sympathy for Palestinians among the general public.

That may be particularly true among university administrators following the publication of a controversial study commissioned by the federal government linking campus antisemitism to the pro-Palestinian protest movement in Canada.

The study, published last month, stated that campus antisemitism is “persistent and proliferating” on Canadian university campuses, citing surveys of Jewish students and students from the larger campus population.

However, critics have challenged the report and its methodology. A network of Jewish-Canadian academics published a lengthy statement this month calling the report “flawed by design” and saying that it “risks fuelling false charges of antisemitism and trivializing actual instances of antisemitism.”

Houlahan, a biology professor at UNB, said that one university colleague accused him of antisemitism because the vigil didn’t include the names of children killed during the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. Forty children were killed at the time, according to Israeli sources cited in a 2024 UN commission report.

He firmly rejects the allegation of antisemitism, saying that if someone chose to read the name of children killed on Oct. 7, 2023, “we would stand in respectful silence” and that he would be equally willing to take part in a similar reading for the estimated 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust.

However, the point of last week’s vigil, he said, was to challenge a “narrative that’s ignoring the children in Gaza.” Houlahan, whose pro-Palestine activism at UNB Saint John previously earned him a trespass notice that was eventually withdrawn, said there were no problems with security this time.

The week-long event took place as students at UNB returned to classes; the volunteers included a number of students, Houlahan said.

Alfarra, the Palestinian-Canadian who lost over 200 family members in Gaza, recalled how children would line up in the schoolyard in Khan Younis — a city largely destroyed by Israeli attacks since 2023 — on the first day of classes when he was a child.

“I still remember how excited the children were at that time. They were excited to hear their names being called and to know which class they would be in,” he said. Reading their names, he tried to imagine their excitement and the joy in their eyes.

“But the children whose names we were reading were not given the chance to hear their names called at school or at their graduation ceremonies,” he said.

A UN commission report published in June found a “consistent pattern of children being deliberately targeted by the Israeli security forces in Gaza,” including children in displacement camps and food distribution sites.

On paper a ceasefire has been in effect since October 2025, but the pattern has continued since then, the report states.

David Gordon Koch is a staff reporter with the NB Media Co-op. This reporting has been made possible in part by the Government of Canada, via the Local Journalism Initiative.