Gaza-Israel: Protect girls now

Although Farah’s daily life is marked by struggle, she has hope for her future.

For 11yearold Farah, life in Gaza is defined by displacement, hunger, and the daily search for essentials like water and food. Her family has spent the past year and a half living in a single wornout tent on the street. Despite losing two years of schooling, Farah returned to class a week ago, determined to learn again, even without books or notebooks.

Farah shares the tent, no larger than a small room, with 11 members of her family. Made from thin, weathered fabric, it offers little protection from Gaza’s harsh seasons. “I don’t want to live in a tent. I want to go back home,” she says. “All 12 of us live there. It’s small, like a small room, and it doesn’t fit us properly.”

In the summer, the tent becomes unbearably hot. In winter, cold winds and rain seep through the fabric. With no bathroom, no heater, and no private place to wash, Farah sometimes goes nearly a week without bathing. Life has been reduced to the basics, surviving the day, making it to the next.

The search for food and water in Gaza

Each morning begins with a task that has become routine for her: collecting water. “I wake up and go collect water. It’s very tiring and heavy. I run and stand in line until I fill it. I carry eight liters. It feels very heavy.” On days when the water truck doesn’t come, the family goes without. Farah remembers one recent Friday when the taps ran dry: “I was very, very thirsty.”

Food is equally uncertain. The family relies on a community kitchen or the kindness of neighbors. “We get food from the community kitchen or we borrow from people, sometimes there isn’t much.” She often shares her portion with her younger siblings, even when her own stomach aches from hunger. “Sometimes we reduce how much we eat so we don’t finish it all.”

Cooking is done over cardboard and scraps of wood. Gas is rare. “We used gas once during last Ramadan, but now there isn’t any,” explains Farah who describes the physical toll of a diet largely made up of barley and corn. “Our stomachs hurt from eating too much barley and corn… We sometimes stay hungry. I feel pain all day and wish we could eat more.”

Reality of displacement

The family’s displacement has been long and traumatic. After armed forces ordered the evacuation of their camp, they fled with only few items of clothing each. Some neighbours who tried to return for belongings were killed. Farah’s family moved repeatedly with nowhere safe to stay. When they briefly visited their home, they found it still standing, but returning wasn’t possible.

The conflict has left deep emotional scars. Farah recalls the moment her younger brother was shot while standing near their tent: “A bullet came and hit him. He became paralysed. I will never forget his voice.” She hopes that one day he will get surgery and be able to walk again.

Returning to school

Despite everything, Farah’s determination to learn has not dimmed. After missing fourth and fifth grade entirely, she returned to school just a week ago. “I am in sixth grade. I am happy because I love school and I like to learn. We need schools like the rest of the world.”

But the school she has returned to has few supplies. “We don’t have anything to read. No notebooks, few pens, and no books.” Still, she has big dreams. “I want to be a teacher, because I love writing and I want children to learn.”

Much needed support

Support from Plan International’s partner, Juzoor for Health and Social Development, has provided some relief. The family has received food vouchers, clothing, medical checks, and physical therapy for Farah’s brother. “We get food, biscuits, and physical therapy for my brother from Juzoor.”

Farah tells us she misses the life she had before, the celebrations during Eid, her home, visiting her grandfather, playing freely with friends. “Now there is no Eid and no one to celebrate with,” she says. “I miss eating sweets and chocolate. I sometimes feel sad when I see something available in the market but I can’t buy it for my siblings because I don’t have any money.”

But amid loss and upheaval, moments of childhood still break through. “I feel happy when my friends call me to play,” she says. She and her cousins jump rope, play on a swing, or climb over rubble because there is nowhere else to go. She loves telling children’s stories and writing them in Arabic.

Although Farah’s daily life is marked by struggle, her imagination remains intact. Her hope for a future in a classroom, of teaching, reading and learning, endures.

In a landscape where so much has been lost, her dreams are one of the few things that remain.

Full captions for images 1-3:

Image 1: After losing two years of school, Farah has just returned to the classroom. Image credit: Juzoor for Health and Social Development.

Image 2: Farah, uses cardboard and pieces of wood to cook with. Image credit: Juzoor for Health and Social Development.

Image 3: Farah sweeps the area around the tent home she share with 11 family members. Image credit: Juzoor for Health and Social Development.

Links:

• https://plan-international.org/case-studies/growing-up-displaced-in-gaza/

When the guns fall silent: What is the true meaning of peace for Gaza’s children?

When — or if — the guns fall silent, Gaza’s children will hear something that they have lost: the sound of silence. If the wishes of Gaza’s children have found their echo in a peace deal being negotiated in Sharm El-Sheikh, this could truly be a new beginning.

For the first time, many will fall asleep without the deafening roar of missiles, the echo of explosions, the relentless buzz of drones or the constant screams of children. The screams and nightmares that once filled anxious nights may fade, replaced — perhaps — by the unfamiliar quiet of safety and sleep.

There are no winners in wars. I have seen this truth in the faces of children and mothers in war zones - in Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and beyond. No words can truly capture what brutal wars leave behind. Lives and landscapes changes for ever.

Approximately 20,000 children are amongst the 67,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since Oct 2023. 1,200 Israelis were also killed in Israel. Children never start wars, yet they suffer the most. Many are buried under the rubble of what used to be homes, schools and hospitals. Thousands more are wounded, orphaned or deeply traumatized. Peace must flow in one direction — toward every child.

Silence, in Gaza, would not be emptiness; it would be the sound of survival, of life daring to return. It may mark the beginning of a new hope for children — to start dreaming of a day they could get a new school bag, a football, a playground and fly a kite in a sky free of the roar of fighter jets.

Fear may give way to real lullabies — sung by mothers who no longer have to whisper and cry in the dark. Many of them have watched their children being killed or amputated. For these children and their mothers, peace is a new moment, a new beginning. They carry the painful memories of the past as they move forward.

Peace is the freedom to wake up and find their homes or schools, or whatever is left where homes and schools stood, still on their imagination. It is the joy of hearing laughter instead of sirens and speeding ambulances.

No child should be part of war — never. And true peace is not only the silencing of weapons. It is a starting point for healing wounds that bullets and bombs leave behind. It is rebuilding classrooms where laughter can replace the sound of falling rubble. It is helping children unlearn fear — and to think of celebrations, not death.

Families might rebuild their mornings with the simple act of making tea and breathing freely without fear — small moments that carry immense meaning when peace has been absent for so long.

Peace is not defined only by the absence of wars and is not a pause between two wars. In Gaza, a whole generation of children have lived through wars or conflict six times - in 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021 and another one since October 2023. There is only so much that young minds can take.

I have seen first-hand the inexplicable brutality of war, and the impact of weapons and blast injuries and burn injuries on children in Gaza and other war zones during my humanitarian missions. I have also witnessed the determination of children in Gaza to beat despair.

That is why peace must travel in one direction — towards every child, every family, every shattered classroom and bombed playground. Negotiations may start in closed rooms. In true sense, peace is what must be lived in homes, schools, hospitals, libraries, market cafes and streets.

Peace is often the sound of crayons scratching on paper instead of warning sirens. It is a girl walking safely to school or a child kicking a football without fear or flying a kite. Peace becomes a reality when children start talking in future tense and when a family dares to plan for tomorrow.

Yesterday, I visited a humanitarian warehouse in Cairo. Young volunteers - some still in college - stood shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues from Plan International Egypt, packing food and loading trucks headed for Gaza. There was a quiet rhythm to their work, a shared purpose that spoke louder than words.

Hope was everywhere — in their hands, in their eyes, in the way they moved faster as another anxious, yet more optimistic day, progressed. Each box carried more than food; it carried care, compassion, and the belief that Gaza’s children deserve a tomorrow filled with peace.

When peace finally comes — and we must all believe it will even when every peace negotiations look shaky and “is one step forward and two steps backwards” as peace negotiators often describe the moment — it will not be hollow. It will be sacred. It will be the soft echo of a people reclaiming their humanity, one heartbeat, one child, one dawn at a time.

For Gaza’s children, peace is the right to grow up with dignity, to laugh without flinching, to rebuild memories not of war, but of wonder. Silence, in that sense, is not emptiness; it has the potential to be music of healing.

I remember 2009 vividly — another brutal war, another mission. Amid the dust and debris in Gaza, I met 12-year-old Omsiyat. She asked me a question that has stayed with me since: “Why are children made to suffer in wars?”

Omsiyat and her young friends were picking up burnt books and crayon peace posters out of the rubble of their partly charred school. A smile (I would call a ‘one and a half smile’) broke on the face of another girl when she spotted a colourful poster she had drawn. She told me that she is happy she got it back, sad the bombs burned a part of it, trying, even then, to find light amid the ashes.

When peace travels in one direction, it is about hope and life. Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian national poet, wrote “There is so much in this land worth living for”, something Gaza’s children deserve.

Links:

• https://www.planusa.org/blog/gaza-peace-for-children/