Colin Sheridan: We quibble over words as children burn in Gaza

60,000 Palestinians, over a quarter of them children, were killed in 600 days. We have watched it all in real time

A man holds a wounded child after receiving treatment at Al-Awda Hospital at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, following an Israeli airstrike that hit a school in the camp on Monday. Picture: Eyad Baba/ AFP

Almost 600 days. 60,000 dead Palestinians. 16,000 of them children. It’s 10.30am on Monday, May 19, and, as I’m writing, Israel has intensified its attacks across Gaza — carrying out over 30 airstrikes since dawn that have killed at least 28 Palestinians.

All of this before Irish children even made it to school.

They are bombing hospitals — the latest include the Indonesian Hospital, previously the last functioning in the north, and southern Gaza’s Nasser Hospital — and are conducting raids on houses in Khan Yunis.

It’s not yet noon and Israel seems intent on making this a day to remember for its acolytes. The bar is high.

On Sunday, May 18, they killed at least 150 people as the rest of us lay in the summer sun.

It didn’t take 600 days for them to prove a pattern. The targeting of hospitals began early after the Hamas attacks of October 7, and — like a child stealing from its parents — once nothing but empty words of concern came from an impotent international community, they pursued their policy of exterminating with extreme prejudice in a manner worthy of the most violent video game.

Hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, playgrounds — no inch of Gaza is safe from soldiers wearing Israeli uniforms but who hail from Hackney, Williamsburg, Le Marais, and South America.

They are not exercising a birthright, but engaging in some sadistic cosplay.

They are burning brown children like a spoiled school bully setting an insect alight through a magnifying glass

Make no mistake, there are middle-class kids with college degrees doing the slaughter. They will swap their IDF fatigues for chinos and go back to work for tech firms when all of this is over.

It’s 10.52am and the number of dead has been updated to 34 — many of them women and children.

Already it is clear today will become a microcosm of not just Israel’s siege on Gaza — but its subjugation of Palestine, period.

Bomb entire hospitals to “kill a solitary Hamas commander”.

Issue forced displacement orders to a population weak with hunger who have nowhere left to go and no energy to take them.

A little boy is fed by his mother with food from a community kitchen at the Muwasi camp for displaced Palestinians in Khan Yunis, southern Gaza Strip, on Sunday. Picture: Abdel Kareem Hana/AP

Open the tap of aid to allow a trickle after a four-month blockade, just enough to satisfy an increasingly queasy but subservient client media and international community.

'A skeleton covered in skin' is how one aid worker described a severely malnourished one-year-old boy to AP

He weighed only 11 pounds, less than half what is normal on average. The boy had not grown any teeth, she said, and was too weak to cry.

Israel will do all of this while releasing polished footage of their crimes, complete with arrows and smart graphics.

This neat trick keeps the facade of sophistication the West likes to point to when weighing up the moral ambiguity of the least ambiguous conflict since the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Yes, I mentioned the Holocaust — for so long the linguistic red-line none of us should ever cross. Well, adjudicators, you have your evidence. Quibble over verbiage as the children burn.

Last week, about 570 days in, we were told that Israel had “gone too far” by some major news organisations and celebrity commentators. Ha!

The same ones who published unverified accounts of rape and sexual violence on their front pages after October 7. The same ones who repeatedly platformed Zionist psychopaths, giving oxygen to the myth of moral superiority as newborns were left to die in incubators 16 months ago. Already orphaned, perhaps they were better off dead.

Smoke rises following an Israeli army bombardment in the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, on Monday. Picture: Ohad Zwigenberg/AP

One of my oldest friends was one of the first on the scene in Al-Shifa Hospital when those babies were discovered, almost 30 of them in a tub without a name or a piece of paper to identify them.

I’ll never forget him — this stoic bear of a man — breaking down in a car telling me about what he found. How he couldn’t move from the shock of it. How small, cold, and quiet they were. How the soldiers stood idly by, doing nothing to help them.

We obsess over Eurovision, Kneecap, Gary Lineker, Douglas Murray, and Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis. Call me woke, but I’ll save my tears for the Palestinian children killed since I started writing this.

Last week, speaking before a stupid song contest, I heard somebody from RTÉ say they don’t believe in cultural boycotts in spite of staff there calling for just that. That’s nice. I don’t believe a child should be too weak to cry because Israel makes it so, but there you go.

The curtain has yet to be pulled back on the true horror. The tens of thousands of rotting corpses. The disease

The unfathomable trauma a baby born today in Rafah will live with for the rest of its tortured life.

Such are the obvious limits of our emotional bandwidth, we need not seek meaning in what we cannot see — because we saw everything. The decapitated babies. The dogs eating the dead.

The parents picking up the mangled flesh of their children — blown apart by weapons paid for by America, made in the EU.

The munitions that pierced the skin of those children at 5,000km/h were flown over Irish airspace. The bonds that paid for them approved by the Irish Central Bank.

That’s just today. It’s noon. 46 dead already. By the time you read this, that will have doubled.

• This article was originally published on May 19, 2025.