Jewish Israelis confront Gaza genocide with photos of slain children

TEL AVIV, Israel (LifeSiteNews) — Protests against Israel’s ongoing genocidal attacks upon Gaza are growing in Israel itself with conscientious Israelis merely holding pictures of hundreds of beautiful Palestinian children who have been killed by Israeli military strikes in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Beginning following Israel’s shattering of the Trump-brokered ceasefire agreement in March, a few activists began bringing pictures of the children to weekly demonstrations being held on behalf of Israeli hostages in Gaza, demanding the government prioritize their release.

As reported by Israeli outlet Haaretz, often large numbers of weekly protestors have had to walk by their fellow Israelis holding the pictures of the killed Palestinian children on their way to the larger protest which has been held in front of Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Though starting out with just around ten friends, activist Amit Shilo, 30, said she was surprised by the responses from other protestors. "As soon as people began to arrive, they straightaway came near us and really scanned the pictures with their eyes. They displayed a connection, spoke to each other, saying 'What is that?' 'Oh, these are children we have killed in Gaza.'"

READ: Gaza releases names of 15,000+ children killed by Israel since October 2023

With the weekly demonstration continuing, another activist, Neora Shem, said that this last weekend, March 7, "I guess we had about 1,000 people.”

"We printed 1,000 pictures and handed out almost all of them. It is kind of encouraging," she said. Yet, the Israeli activist added, "it is also very hard. I have been running around all week with pictures of dead children in my hands, saying, 'Oh, the printing came out nice,' and then I think about how sad this all is."

Each of the posters states “Involuntarily involved” at the top along with the inscription of the child’s name and the date and circumstances of the child’s death. The information regarding each child is collected by Israeli activist Adi Argov who runs The Daily File website which is associated with an Israeli advocacy group for Palestinian rights called “Looking the Occupation in the Eye.”

Before the protest, activists brief participants on the rules: no writing or slogans on clothing, no stickers and no speech, including no arguing with passersby or hecklers. “The power is in the silence,” reports Haaretz. “The silence is penetrating.”

Though there have been some negative comments from bystanders, the activists expected far worse. "We thought we were going to get beaten up,” said 37-year-old organizer Alma Beck. “We were very, very surprised that the response was different, that people came over, asked what this was, who are those children, what happened to them.”

"People are crying, they say all power to us and thank you," Shilo explained. "Once, a reservist passed us, and he was really crying. He told us, 'I don't want to be part of this,' and that he intends to refuse to go back to Gaza."

“We felt that here, at last, something is coming in through the cracks of denial. The sense is that this thing is trickling down to people," said Beck. "It is clear to us that our struggle is a shared one: to end the war in Gaza in order to save the hostages and save innocents in Gaza. This goes hand in hand."

Conservative estimates of deaths in Gaza include 274,400 total fatalities, 120,736 children

Reliable reports of direct Palestinian deaths at the hands of the Israeli army during the last 20 months number at least 54,880 people, not including around an additional 14,000 presumed dead under the rubble and more than 17,400 children. Approximately 126,227 Gazans have been injured, including over 10,000 children who have lost at least one leg.

READ: Volunteer surgeons in Gaza describe ‘horrifying violence deliberately directed at civilians,’ children

Last December, advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International released extensive reports concluding Israeli authorities were deliberately seeking to bring about the destruction of the people of Gaza by various means, including the deprivation of necessities like water, food, energy and medical care, amounting to crimes of genocide.

Additionally, as early as January 2024, the International Court of Justice delivered a preliminary ruling. finding the charge of genocide against Israel to be “plausible,” and last November the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes,” including “starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

READ Genocide ‘only reasonable conclusion’ to Israel’s crimes in Gaza: Amnesty International

According to a rationale presented in a Lancet study last July, one can conservatively estimate total deaths, including indirect fatalities due to causes like starvation, lack of medicine or proper medical care, by multiplying direct deaths (54,880) by five to arrive at 274,400 total fatalities. And with a November UN Human Rights Office report identifying fatalities in Gaza comprising of approximately 44% children, it is reasonable to estimate 120,736 total deaths of children.

Jewish activists ‘stand in the forefront, the vanguard, of the opposition to this genocidal war’

While the Trump administration has been weaponizing the justice system against critics of Israel’s war in Gaza, attacking political speech under the guise of “antisemitism,” these thousands of Jewish Israeli protestors join other Jews across the globe exercising similar protests against what some have called, Israel’s “sadistic” “genocide” in the enclave.

In commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day last January, a group of Jews in London gathered to additionally recognize and protest “the one genocide going on in front of our eyes, the Gaza Genocide.”

“I think it’s so important on a Holocaust Memorial Day that we commemorate the suffering of all genocides and don’t create a hierarchy where only some genocides matter and others don’t, which unfortunately is what our government is doing,” said Mark Etkind at the time.

A fellow Jewish protestor with him explained, “We feel particularly strongly that the Holocaust is being exploited and anti-Semitism is being exploited hugely as a way of, I would say, closing down many people who would like to support the Palestinians in their struggle and in their suffering for fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.”

“And I would make a very strong distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism,” she said, echoing the conclusions of thousands of Orthodox rabbis who have argued that Judaism and Zionism are actually incompatible, with some even calling the militant religious movement “satanic.”

READ: Orthodox rabbi: Zionism a ‘cardinal sin’ for Jews, creation of Israel is ‘satanic’

Indeed, in March of last year, Jewish Middle East scholar, author and activist Norman Finkelstein observed the high “number of self-identified Jews, in particular Jewish Voices for Peace or the organization Not in Our Name, who now stand in the forefront, the vanguard, of the opposition to this genocidal war.” Citing a friend, he agreed that “the best organized and the most aggressive opponents of the Israeli genocide are Jewish.” (Readers may find additional sources on this point here, here, here, and here.)

To quickly contact your members of Congress and implore their support for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza click here.