Seeing entire families disappear in the Gaza Strip as Israeli attacks intensify, some parents are choosing to write their children’s names on the bodies to “at least preserve the memory.”
40-year-old Sarah al-Khalidi, along with her four children, was able to witness the explosion near her home in the Tal al-Hawa area. “At that moment I thought that if the house came under heavy shelling, my children would die and no one would be able to identify them. I was afraid of this thought,” the woman told Al Jazeera.
When she took refuge in the family home in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, the woman saw names written on the children’s bodies. At the time, she thought that such a practice might bring bad luck, but when she saw the doctors at Al Shifa Hospital taking this measure, Sarah changed her mind.
“The world needs to know these children killed by Israel because these are not numbers, but names, stories and dreams killed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza,” he said.
Over the past three weeks, Israeli attacks in the Palestinian enclave, one of the most densely populated areas in the world, have killed more than 7,300 people, including about 3,000 children.
Writing children’s names on their arms or legs is an attempt to identify them if they die as a result of an attack. This way, parents will be able to bury them in graves rather than mass graves, Al Jazeera writes.
Gaza’s health ministry, which published a 212-page report naming the dead Palestinians, said there were 200 bodies that were mutilated beyond recognition and therefore impossible to identify.