The author's children - 51-day-old Ryan and seven-year-old Yaman - were killed by the Israeli army in January 2024 in Gaza City [Courtesy of Aya Shamaa]By Aya ShamaaPublished On 1 Jun 20261 Jun 2026
I woke up beneath the rubble, surrounded by darkness, dust, collapsed concrete and the screams of my six-year-old son Nasser crying hysterically above the ruins, trying to reach my buried fingers.
What I did not yet know was that a part of me had already died.
When I emerged, I discovered that my 51-day-old baby Ryan had been recovered lifeless after spending more than an hour trapped under the debris. He was a child born during a temporary “ceasefire” in the war. Life had briefly granted him permission to see the world before taking him away almost immediately.
His body was so small that I wrapped him in part of my own clothing, afraid he would feel cold.
I was told Yaman, my seven-year-old, had suffered only minor injuries and had been taken to the hospital. The truth, however, was that my little boy had died before reaching it. They brought him back to me lifeless, only moments after I had bid farewell to Ryan.
On that winter day in January 2024 on the outskirts of Gaza City, my whole world was shattered.
Like countless mothers in Gaza, I had feared hunger for my children. I had feared displacement, terror and interrupted education. But despite everything, I never dared to think of death.
Ryan never had the chance to grow up and enjoy his childhood. He was denied the chance to run, play and laugh with his brothers.
Yaman, on the other hand, had shown us his amazing potential.
We called him “the little philosopher” because of the way he spoke formal Arabic with astonishing fluency and spent hours watching documentaries about space, wildlife, oceans and plants. He loved books deeply, memorised stories of the prophets and joined a Quran memorisation centre shortly before the war. Even during bombardment and displacement, we continued reciting verses together.
He was a very sensitive child. He refused to eat meat because he loved animals so much and could not understand why they were harmed and killed.
After our home was partially destroyed early in the war, I remember feeling devastated. Yaman came to comfort me with the confidence only children possess and said, “Mama, don’t be sad. After the war, I’ll build you a bigger and more beautiful house.”
In Gaza, the genocide is not just the mass killing of children. It is erasing human potential, destroying bright futures. It is taking away the scientist who could have discovered a cure for a deadly disease, the writer who could have written an award-winning book, the engineer who could have devised a new invention to help humanity, the son who could have built his mother a big, beautiful house.
And perhaps what is even crueller than death itself is how ordinary loss has become in Gaza. For the rest of the world, Ryan and Yaman were just two entries added to the statistic of 21,000 Palestinian children massacred. Nameless and faceless for the world, they were everything for us.
My surviving son, Nasser, became an only child after losing both his brothers. I still remember him pulling at Yaman’s white burial shroud, crying and refusing to let them take his brother away. Since that day, he has never been the same. He spends long hours staring silently at photographs of Yaman on a mobile phone as though he is trying to understand how a child can disappear so suddenly.
This war does not leave only corpses beneath the rubble. It leaves survivors buried beneath psychological ruins that crush their souls day by day.
Today is International Children’s Day, a day dedicated to children’s rights and wellbeing. For me, it is a day to reflect on how the world failed to protect my children.
This is a world that has three other “children’s days”: World Children’s Day, the International Day of the Boy Child and the International Day of the Girl Child. It has a Convention on the Rights of the Child. It has national and international laws protecting children. It has a special United Nations agency dedicated to children, UNICEF. It has countless organisations dedicated to protecting children, feeding them, educating them, providing healthcare for them, etc.
Why have all of these special days, organisations and laws when they do nothing to stop the massacres of children?
Ryan and Yaman were taken away from me in January 2024. Thousands of other Palestinian mothers have had to bury their children since then. There is a “ceasefire” now, and children are still being killed on an almost daily basis in Gaza.
Why have images of children wrapped in white shrouds become so easily normalised? Why has the world witnessed this scale of slaughter and not collapsed morally under its weight?
Perhaps because the world has grown accustomed to seeing Palestinian children as numbers, not as human beings. Perhaps because decades of dehumanisation have finally borne fruit.
Behind every number, there is a mother who still remembers the sound of her child’s voice, the foods he refused to eat, the dreams he spoke about and the tiny details life never allowed him enough time to enjoy.
There is me: the mother who still remembers the soft cry of her baby boy Ryan and the soft-spoken voice of seven-year-old Yaman.
Ryan and Yaman are not numbers. They are my children whom the world failed to protect.
