Look carefully, look tenderly, don’t turn away. Please don’t turn away as all the nations of the world have, for decades, turned away from Palestine.

Hamza is Palestine.

Look carefully at Israel’s savage violation to his once perfect little body when on the 25th July 2014, Israel’s soldiers loaded and fired pale blue artillery shells that discharged white incendiary rain on Gaza in hundreds of phosphorous-impregnated felt wedges as Hamza and his family slept.

Imagine the agony Hamza suffered from the moment the white phosphorous struck and burrowed through his soft three year old skin. Phosphorous burns are only contained by blocking off oxygen but the extreme pain and, as you can see, the horrific tissue damage endures.

Hamza’s father and two siblings were also burnt but luckily their injuries were less severe. Imagine the wounded family’s terrifying walk through the night to the nearest hospital.

It is heartbreaking to imagine Hamza’s parents, Mus’ab and Kifah distress watching their little boy trapped in pain; his mind and hospital bed shaking with the relentless hammering over yet another 32 days of Israeli bombs with their thunderous soundtrack of war striking trauma into every cell of the child and all the terrified, war-weary Gazan families.


The trauma has made a once happy and boisterous child, mute. His inability to speak depresses his parents who try to make life as normal as possible for Hamza.

The photographer, Hassan Rabie, has sensitively shared with us Hamza’s innocence in his acquiescent pose with his little hand gently protecting the heinous painful and itchy scar on his arm, in the flawless skin on his face, in the little frown and the eye-lashes that you know have been burdened with tears of unbearable pain, day and night.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/israels-every-day-terrorism-crimes-against-palestinian-children-for-hamza-arms-sanctions-against-israel/5438212