It is always at bedtime that the horror of Gaza hits Naila Khan. “You know the images of those Palestinian parents, where they’re rocking their dead child?” she asks me, from Manchester. “Every evening when I’m rocking my child, all I can imagine is those mothers holding their children and I think to myself: my child is breathing, is alive, is healthy, safe, has got shelter. We’re not being bombed.”
Khan is a mother of four and, like many parents, she is struggling to process this war and the horrific impact on the children of Gaza. The death toll is unprecedented in our lifetimes, as is the on-the-ground footage we are seeing. I now understand why my mother couldn’t watch the news for years after I was born, and yet I can’t turn away. This war has galvanised my friends and acquaintances on social media, many of them parents. I get a lot of parenting content from Instagram, and use the platform to share my experiences. The horrifying footage of dead and injured children and distressed parents is now mixed in – it is a constant on my feed – eroding any barrier to empathy that might have existed between us before the age of social media.
It is important to bear witness, but some parents, like Khan, are going beyond that. It is difficult enough for adults to compute the war in Gaza and the slaughter of 7 October. How do you begin to explain it to children? Islamophobia and antisemitism are on the rise in the UK, and incidents in schools will mean some difficult and painful conversations taking place in British homes.
Khan, a primary school teacher, founded the group Creative Kindness because she was concerned about the emotional impact of the war on children. Last month, she organised a “Watermelon Seeds March” to MediaCity in Salford. Parents and kids laid down clothes, shoes and teddy bears in tribute to the more than 13,000 Palestinian children that have been killed by Israel. “Children are observing all this, and we don’t know the drastic effects it’s going to have on them,” she tells me. “We are providing them with a safe space and an outlet to release their emotions and their innermost feelings … through drawing and creative art therapy.” Before the march, children made placards and kites – a poignant symbol of the children of Gaza, who in 2011 broke the world record for the most flown simultaneously.
The delicate balance between honesty and shielding your child from the scale of the massacre is a tough one to tread. Omar, a father of one and a Syrian refugee who works for a refugee charity, became involved with the group Parents for Palestine after he saw their “teddy blockade” outside the Foreign Office in October. The London-based coalition of parents and caregivers came together to protest and express their shared grief, which has led to them forming “family bloc” spaces at anti-war demonstrations and carrying out smaller, child-friendly actions. “I try to protect my son as much as I can,” he says, “but I try to balance it. It’s not correct to stay silent.” His son, who is six, was upset to learn in October that 3,000 children had been killed. “Since then, every couple of days he’s asked me, what’s the number now? I tried to fake it. I tell him it’s 3,001. I know it’s more, but I don’t want to affect him.”
Omar’s friend Zaina was one of the first people to become involved in Parents for Palestine, and has found it a great comfort. A Palestinian mother of one, she was in the West Bank visiting family with her baby daughter when the Hamas attacks on 7 October and the subsequent Israeli invasion unfolded. Returning to the UK and encountering a political narrative that paints Palestinians as extremists and terrorists put her, she says, “in a dark place mentally”. Her daughter is too young to know what’s going on, but Zaina worries about her future because of her mixed heritage. “Her whole existence is not safe in this country, because she carries multiple identities,” she says.
Like many parents, Zaina has found the group a “healing space”; being with others who feel similarly helps. This need for community in the face of such tragedy is one of the reasons the online group Mothers Against Genocide was formed. “We came together, first of all, to support each other, because we were finding we were scrolling on our phones at night and not sleeping and crying,” says cofounder and mother of two Nuala Ní Scolláin. What began as a WhatsApp group is now an Instagram community with more than 27,000 followers. Coming from the Irish language community of west Belfast, she had always had sympathy with the Palestinian cause “because we were oppressed ourselves”, but it was the stark contrast between her own situation and theirs which spurred her to action. “You can’t help but imagine that that’s your child.”
I would be lying if I said that parenthood hadn’t made me more viscerally affected by children’s suffering, but no one is suggesting that being a parent gives you greater empathy. “That need to protect: you don’t need to have birthed a child to have that within you,” Ní Scolláin says. “It’s one of the basic foundations of humanity. Our roles as elders to those children is that we are there for their protection, for their development, to nourish them, to make them feel loved and needed in the world.”
Perhaps it is that instinct that has seen a particular quote from James Baldwin, who loved children but never had his own, proliferating on placards at demonstrations and across social media: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognising this may be incapable of morality.”
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
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