Hind Rajab (2018-2024) was a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed during the war in Gaza. She has become a poster child of the horrors taking place there. Protesters at Columbia University named a building they took over after her, Hind’s Hall. Rapper Macklemore wrote a song with the same name. “Hind” rhymes with the “wind” that blows.
On January 29th 2024, the Israeli occupation force ordered civilians to leave western Gaza City. Hind’s uncle loaded everyone in the car to leave – her along with her aunt and four cousins. But just a few blocks later they ran into the Israeli army. Their car was shot up. Everyone died except for Hind and her 15-year-old cousin Layan.
Layan, with the help of an uncle overseas, got on the phone with the Red Crescent, the Muslim counterpart of the Red Cross. But the call ended in gunfire. Later analysis showed that the gunfire was too fast to be Palestinian but not too fast to be Israeli.
When the Red Crescent called back only Hind was still alive, now all alone in a car surrounded by the bodies of her aunt and uncle and four cousins. An Israeli tank was approaching the car.
HIND RAJAB: [translated] I’m so scared. Please come. Please call someone to come and take me.
RED CRESCENT DISPATCHER: [translated] OK, dear, I will come and take you.
You can hear the fear in her voice. The dispatcher tried to keep her on the phone while arranging for an ambulance. Or, rather, arranging for the safe passage of an ambulance. Under international law ambulances are allowed safe passage through war zones if clearly marked. The same with journalists. But the Israelis do not uphold international law.
Night was falling, Hind was scared, but still on the phone. After three hours the Red Crescent finally got permission. The ambulance was just up the street when the Red Crescent lost contact with both the ambulance and her.
For 12 days no one knew what happened. It was unsafe to enter that part of the city. On the 12th day one of her uncles arrived. He found the ambulance and the car.
The car was shot up, riddled with bullet holes. The bodies of Hind, her aunt and uncle and four cousins were decomposing. The ambulance had been bombed. Nearby was an artillery shell – made in the USA.
She is hardly the only child to die in Gaza. According to the United Nations at least 14,500 children have died so far, as of April 29th 2024. But her story has a face and a voice, humanizing the dehumanized.
Almost a perfect victim: While she was defenceless and innocent, she is not quite White enough and Israel is so much a part of the White American power structure that even Rachel Corrie, an actual White person, did not rate as a perfect victim. But Hind is close enough to touch the hearts of at least some White people. At least that of Ana Kasparian, a news presenter who cried on air. If, that is, you count Armenian Americans as White.
– Abagond, 2024.
Sources: mainly Democracy Now!
See also:
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“Almost a perfect victim: While she was defenceless and innocent, she is not quite White enough and Israel is so much a part of the White American power structure that even Rachel Corrie, an actual White person, did not rate as a perfect victim. But Hind is close enough to touch the hearts of at least some White people. At least that of Ana Kasparian, a news presenter who cried on air. If, that is, you count Armenian Americans as White.”
‘Rasse über alles’. Glad to see that Abagond is in fine fettle today and back to his old hobbyhorse. The important thing is that this child’s death brought tears to the eyes of a white, or potentially,white woman on tv. I don’t usually object much to this sort of crude racialization of events, but it is jarring here. Have you forgotten all the “black faces in high places” in this revolting saga? Karine Jean-Pierre, Lloyd Austin, Charles Q. Brown jr, the mayor of New York aren’t ‘white’, do you doubt that they and other non-whites are made members of that ‘White American power structure’? That type of 1960s rhetoric is absurd. “The Man” is multicultural and just as criminal as in the ‘good old days’. Where you on one of your nostalgia trips when you wrote this stuff?
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“Where” above should be “were’
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Gaza broke my heart.
My blood is not Palestinian but my tears are.
(https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1OLSI_Croz/?igsh=MWQ1ZGUxMzBkMA==)
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Rest in Peace, little one.
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According to the Washington Post, the Red Crescent was able to patch Hind’s mother into the call, and she was on the phone when they lost contact with Hind:
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2024/hind-rajab-israel-gaza-killing-timeline/)
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