Israel’s Killing of Hind Rajab 1 Year Ago Is a Stain on Our Collective Humanity

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Hind Rajab was barely 6 years old when she found herself the sole survivor of a brutal Israeli onslaught that had killed six members of her family in front of her eyes: her uncle, aunt and four cousins.

January 29, 2024, was a day of unspeakable horror. The Israeli military was pounding the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood in Gaza City, part of its campaign of bombarding the Strip from land, air and sea. Following evacuation orders by the Israeli army, Rajab’s family, already displaced many times and separated by the war, decided to flee. Moving under intense bombardment, with Israeli soldiers approaching, some members of the family fled on foot, while seven others, including Hind, fled in a small Kia Picanto.

The family had barely left their war-ravaged neighborhood in Gaza City when their car was shelled by Israeli forces with chilling precision, instantly killing everyone inside, save for Rajab and her cousin Layan Hamada. Unsatisfied, Israeli tanks then opened fire on the shelled car. Stuck in the car, among their deceased relatives, Rajab and Hamada contacted the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) as they were fighting for their lives and struggling to avoid relentless and direct fire to ask for help. Hamada, aged 15, survived the initial assault along with Rajab, but was executed while the cousins were on the phone with PRCS. The gunshots could be heard on a recording of the call, muffled only by Hamada’s horrified screams, before she fell silent.

“They are all dead,” a horrified Rajab later said of her six family members. After Hamada was killed, PRCS dispatchers maintained intermittent contact via phone with Rajab, now the sole survivor. For hours, the world listened as she fought bravely for her survival, pleading with her mother, and reciting the Quran with medics who tried to console her, before her small voice fell into silence.

Twelve days later, following the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the area, Hind Rajab was found killed, along with the two impossibly heroic Palestinian paramedics PRCS dispatched to the scene to rescue her, Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoun. She was identified by a necklace and a crown she wore. Some of her last words were: “The night is approaching. I’m so scared, please come take me!”

Rajab’s wanton killing is a stain on our collective humanity. Stranded in the shelled car and hiding among the bodies of six relatives, she pleaded for her life for hours, and her pleas were heard around the world. She could see an Israeli tank approaching toward her. “The tank is next to me,” she told the distraught paramedics on the phone, with whom she pleaded for help. Still, the Israeli army executed her, just like it had executed her displaced family as they were fleeing to safety. The car was found riddled with bullets, charred and burned to ashes, and filled with the family’s decomposing bodies, shelled almost beyond recognition. The research agency Forensic Architecture mapped a total of 335 bullet holes on the body of the Kia where Rajab was found killed.

“They killed her twice,” Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, later told NBC. “This is her weapon: a crown that she was wearing.”

The Israeli soldiers executed Rajab even as she lay wounded and covered in blood in the ravaged car. She had been “shot in the hand, back, and leg,” as she told her mother on the phone. Her mouth was bleeding too, and though she could barely speak, she hesitated to wipe it with her clothes to spare her mother the trouble of washing it. She struggled to breathe amid the dreadful reek of blood and fire, and dead bodies. She screamed and pleaded for her life through her dying breaths. “Don’t leave me alone, Mama,” she pleaded. “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, and I’m wounded.”

Yet the Israeli army could not find the basic humanity to spare her. “It’s very likely that the Israeli soldiers were able to see who was in the car,” one forensic expert concluded in an Al Jazeera investigation after analyzing the Israeli tanks’ position.

Forensic Architecture came to a similar conclusion: “It’s not plausible that the shooter could not have seen that the car was occupied by civilians, including children. From the tank position indicated by the greatest alignment between entry and exit holes, we concluded that the shooter would have had a clear view of the car and its passengers.”

Moreover, Israeli forces denied ambulance access to Rajab’s location for hours, before shelling the ambulance that tried to reach her. Footage taken by rescue workers and journalists from the crime scene shows fragments of artillery shells that read: “Made in the US.”

In the 12 days that rocked Palestine, with millions around the world holding their breaths, an army of paramedics, rescuers and family members tried to save Rajab, only to be brutally spurned by Israel’s killing machine. So appalling was their despair that Rajab’s helpless mother, weeping through her tears, would later ask her girl for forgiveness: “It’s the most difficult feeling in the world to hear my daughter ask me to go get her when I can’t reach her. My sweetheart, I swear, I couldn’t reach you. Forgive me, sweetheart.”

Wissam Hamada let Rajab flee in the car while she set off on foot with her older son because she was trying to save the little girl. In a tragic irony, it was the mother who survived, and who would be haunted with an inescapable sense of remorse.

The killing of Hind Rajab shocked the world, making her a recognizable victim of Israel’s genocidal brutality. Rajab and her cousins were among the nearly 18,000 Palestinian children killed by Israel in Gaza in the span of 15 months –– more than in any other conflict in recent memory, even as these horrifying numbers are widely considered to be an undercount. But those children are not mere numbers. They had hopes and dreams. Hind dreamed of being a dentist, of opening a clinic with her cousin, Layan, who dreamed of being a surgeon. A particularly endearing photo shows Rajab posing in graduation attire.

Israel has targeted a whole generation of Palestinian children in Gaza, with over 20,000 missing, lost, disappeared, detained, or buried under rubble or in mass graves. Israel has killed the very idea of childhood there, and its genocidal war has shattered any sense of normal life for generations to come. As Rajab’s mother poignantly put it, “We were living in our land, living happily in it. We were surrounded by our family.… Our children were around us, growing up together.”

Human rights advocates, led by the Hind Rajab Foundation, are joining forces to hold accountable the war criminals who ordered Rajab’s killing –– “a war crime too many,” to cite a UN human rights body. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry has called on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to do the same. Human rights group Justice For All also submitted a case to the ICC charging the Israeli military with multiple war crimes for the killing of Rajab. Rights group Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor concluded that Rajab’s killing was a “planned execution,” carried out by U.S.-made bombs and missiles.

Meanwhile, undeterred by the brutality and despite overwhelming evidence that Israel executed Rajab and her family, U.S. officials rushed to defend Israel while denying the U.S.’s own complicity. Biden administration officials deflected questions for months, and deferred investigation into the tragedy to Israeli officials. Biden’s National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby declared that the U.S.’s sole responsibility lies in “trying to help Israel defend itself.” It’s a bipartisan complicity. Even Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen — who, in a passionate speech following Rajab’s tragic killing, accused Israel of committing “a textbook war crime” by targeting and starving Palestinian children in Gaza — would later vote to send Israel an additional $14 billion in taxpayer money.

Rajab’s death should not be in vain. In light of Israel’s attempts to erase her memory, we must not only commemorate the anniversary of her killing, but also demand justice for her and the thousands of Palestinian children who have been murdered, maimed, orphaned and traumatized by Israel’s genocidal machine in Gaza, with U.S. weapons and funds. As the Hind Rajab Foundation has pledged: “We refuse to let Hind’s story be forgotten or dismissed. Her story is that of all the victims of this genocide.”

In many ways, Rajab’s name has become a powerful symbol of global solidarity with Gaza and the anti-genocide movement, from Macklemore’s electrifying songs honoring her, to the choice of protesters at Columbia University to famously rename an occupied building Hind’s Hall, to murals around the world.

The global recognition of Rajab’s tragedy must not tempt us into resigning ourselves to the comforting notion of moral or symbolic victory, or a vague sense of historical justice; it must mobilize and galvanize us into action. As I write elsewhere, “Palestinians, like all oppressed peoples, want justice now, on this earth, in their lifetime, while they are still alive and have the power to witness it and benefit from it.”

Rajab will be remembered not only for her brutal killing, but for her courage and resilience as well. We must honor her memory by demanding a permanent and unconditional end to Israel’s genocidal war on children, and an immediate end to its inhumane 18-year blockade of Gaza, where over 1 million children have been born and raised in an open-air prison, and where children like Hind Rajab and Layan Hamada were born and died under siege. Israel is still holding captive hundreds of Palestinian children, including children who have been kidnapped from their homes in Gaza, and who face torture in Israeli military and detention camps.

Had there been a shred of justice in this world, Rajab’s brutal killing, and the rage it spurred worldwide, would have spelled the end of Israel’s genocide a year ago. Last February, UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell wrote: “How many more children will suffer and die before this nightmare ends?” And yet, over 10,000 more children have been slaughtered in Gaza since, where Israel has continued to massacre children with impunity.

This week, remember Hind Rajab and let the memory of her voice on the phone serve as a wake-up call. As her mother, in a heartbreaking testimony on Hind’s final phone call, pleaded with the world: “Wake up! Hind is not the only one. She is not Palestine’s first martyr. We have more than 15,000 martyrs who are children. Wake up! Why are others like Hind still going through this? Why don’t you really wake up? Not for Hind’s sake, but for the sake of other children like Hind.”