The night sky lights up with stars and timeless lullabies for children in South Africa.
Palestinian children no longer see the gentleness of the moon.
Only the glow of blood born of massive bombs
More than 20,000 kids have been killed. Thousands wounded, scarred, and maimed.
Is your child not my child? Are they all not ours?
I thought all the children were ours?
Only a child can play in rubble where dead bodies lie. Only a child can laugh where they weep.
Why did no one feel a need to protect the children of Gaza?
When they are no different from yours? From ours?
They are no different from yours. From ours.
Children are sick and starving to death in Gaza.
This is the only way they are different from yours. From ours.
Trauma is printed, imprinted, all over the faces of children in Gaza.
Death comes to them faster than food reaches Gaza.
Have you ever wiped the tears from a starving child’s face?
Wiped the tears off a child crying not from pain, but hunger?
Starvation is sweeping the length and breadth of Palestine,
while Israelis enjoy the pleasures of life on occupied land.
Once upon a time, thousands of children died of malnutrition
and malnutrition-related diseases in Apartheid South Africa.
Apartheid South Africa
Apartheid Israel
Old friends
Old friends bound by tear gas, bullets, and shared blueprints of brutality
Old friends.
How many decades of apartheid underdevelopment?
How many decades of poor self-image?
How many decades of economic depression?
The answer is always: Hamas. Hamas. Hamas.
But who created Hamas?
Was Hamas not born from the chokehold of occupation?
Occupation – the serpent that coils and tightens, hissing through checkpoints in Gaza
Finally swallowing its prey
Was Hamas not born on necks? On a people made to kneel beneath a flag that was never theirs?
Like uMkhonto weSizwe,
they had no tanks,
no polished army,
just the will to fight back.
They were named terrorists by the ones with the guns
because resistance could never be righteous
when it comes from the shackled.
The discontent festered long before Hamas.
The rage of generations simmered beneath the feet of children. Beneath the rubble.
Were they not already mourning before the world named their grief? Before the world blamed Hamas?
Why must the Palestinian child be taught from an early age
that equality is not for them?
In Palestine, instead of classrooms and books,
children now only know explosives, ammunition, and firearms.
They are no longer seen as children.
Their dehumanised bodies have become a threat.
How unholy in the Holy Land.
Children of Gaza,
I wish that the world could absorb you
not cruelly, as a way to expel you from your home.
I wish I could take you in,
feed you when I feed my own children.
Run a bath for you. Wash your hair.
Take you to school, let you walk on flat ground instead of grenades.
Let you play in the messy playgrounds
that have not been soiled with the stench of death.
Take your trauma and place it in mine
Let me hold your trauma in place of mine
because this is pain no child should carry.
I wish I could return all they stole
I wish I could give you back your childhood
I wish I could give you back your mothers,
your fathers,
your brothers and sisters.
I wish I could give you back everything that was never theirs to take
but everything you should have never had to lose,
in the land of Olive Trees.
To cite this poem:
Nkebakazi Makwetu, ‘The Children of Gaza – Night Skies,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Visions, No. 1 (29 August 2025)
The Children of Gaza – Night Skies © 2025 by Ncebakazi Makwetu is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Featured image: Palestinians wait to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen, in Jabalia, in the northern Gaza Strip, May 14, 2025. MAHMOUD ISSA / REUTERS
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