Beyond the War Fields: When Humanity Demands a Voice

Buried Before They Bloomed: The Erasure of Gaza’s Youngest Generation

By Lukie Pieterse – Editor and Publisher, Potato News Today

The Relevance Beyond Potatoes: Why We Must Speak Now

As the editor of a global publication dedicated to potatoes, reaching well over 12,000 people world wide, I never imagined I would feel compelled to write about genocide. But I also never imagined I would live to see an average of 30 children killed every day over the past 535 days in Gaza, many in their beds, many while sheltering in UN schools, many while simply playing.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has killed at least 17,400 children in Gaza, including 15,600 who have been identified. Many more remain buried under the rubble, most presumed dead. I never imagined that in 2024, babies would die in incubators for lack of power, that famine would be wielded like a bomb, that our world would watch—knowing—and still remain largely silent.

This article is not about potatoes. But it is about life, and the moral responsibility of those who help nurture it. Farmers understand that. Parents do. So should editors. And so should leaders.

In a time when Palestinian children are starved, shelled, orphaned, and buried en masse, this is not a political story—it is a human story. And it must be told.

A Catastrophe Measured in Children’s Lives

Over 17,000 children have been orphaned, and more than 32,000 have suffered injuries so severe that some may never walk, see, or speak again. Not to mention the psychological trauma caused by this senseless war.

This is not simply a tragedy. It is a mass extermination of a generation.

These deaths have occurred in homes, mosques, hospitals, food distribution lines, and even inside marked UN shelters. In a single airstrike on Al-Maghazi refugee camp in December 2024, over 70 people were killed, half of them children.

Mariam, a 9-year-old from Beit Lahia, was reading a comic book when her house was bombed. She lost both legs. Her twin brother Youssef was killed. Mariam now lies in a corridor at Al-Awda Hospital, with no pain relief beyond ibuprofen. “Will I ever go to school again?” she whispers.

There is no military objective that justifies this. No strategy that excuses it. There is only death, and the normalization of that death.

When Hospitals Become Targets

As of early 2024, 76% of all hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed or made non-operational. Every major pediatric unit has been damaged. 132 UN shelters have been hit—despite Israel having their GPS coordinates.

In Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s main medical facility, premature babies died after incubators lost power. During a multi-day siege in November, soldiers entered operating rooms with rifles, pulled patients from beds, and detained doctors.

In Khan Younis, maternity wards were shelled mid-delivery. A woman in labor died clutching the hand of her midwife, who was also killed. The twins survived, but no one knows who will raise them.

These attacks violate the Geneva Conventions, yet no one has been held accountable? Least of all the Israelis – who did this?

Psychological Collapse: The War Inside the Mind

The psychological impact on Gaza’s children is not collateral—it is core to the trauma. Save the Children reports that over 95% of children in Gaza are now suffering from acute psychological distress. Mental health specialists describe the crisis as “worse than any post-war zone in recent memory.”

Aseel, once a lively girl who loved riddles, now lies curled in a corner. She hasn’t spoken since seeing her grandfather decapitated by an airstrike.

Bilal, 7, covers his ears all day and refuses food. “He thinks drones can hear him breathe,” his mother says.

The war is creating a generation of children who will grow up without safe memories, without the emotional architecture to build resilience. With less than 50 child psychologists left in Gaza, most children are untreated.

These invisible wounds will last far beyond the bombs if and when they stop falling.

Starving the Young: Famine by Design

In February 2024, the United Nations declared northern Gaza in a state of “catastrophic famine”. Here are the facts:

• 31% of children under 5 are now acutely malnourished.
• More than 576,000 Gazans, most of them children and women, are facing complete starvation.
• Multiple infants and toddlers have already died of hunger, dehydration, or preventable diseases.

Food aid is blocked at borders for more than three months at the time of writing. Convoys are bombed. Crops have been destroyed. Bakeries flattened. Wells contaminated. Even the animals—chickens, goats—have been killed or starved.

Lina, 8 months old, died in her sleep after drinking salty water. Her mother, Abeer, hadn’t eaten in two days and was unable to breastfeed. “I tried to give her crushed dates,” she sobbed. “But even those are gone.”

This is not wartime scarcity. This is the calculated denial of food to a population under siege—a violation of international law and a weapon of war.

Displacement Without Shelter

1.9 million Gazans have been displaced. That’s nearly the entire population. Many have fled 5, 10, or even 15 times. Most now live in tent encampments, burned-out schoolyards, or among the ruins of other people’s homes.

Nidal, 9, sleeps beneath a plastic sheet with his grandmother and two cousins. He has a severe foot infection. There is no clean water to wash, no antibiotic cream, no doctor. “We hear rats at night,” he says. “They come to eat what’s left.”

Thousands of children have died from exposure—hypothermia, pneumonia, infections. In December and January, dozens of babies froze to death in Rafah and Deir al-Balah.

When survival itself becomes a miracle, you are no longer living. You are enduring.

Children Behind Bars

In the West Bank, Israeli raids have intensified. According to DCI-Palestine, over 850 children were arrested by Israeli forces in 2023. Many were held in solitary confinement. Some were tortured. Most were denied lawyers.

Ahmad, 13, was dragged from bed at 2:15 a.m. Soldiers blindfolded him, zip-tied his hands, and shoved him into an armored vehicle. He was accused of throwing stones. He was beaten with a rifle butt until he lost consciousness.

These children are criminalized not for what they’ve done—but for who they are.

A Future Without Schools

More than 600,000 children in Gaza are now without access to education. Schools have been bombed and burned. Libraries demolished. Teachers killed. The concept of a “school year” no longer exists.

Rania, 15, used to top her science class. Now she teaches multiplication tables to younger children in a tent using charcoal on broken tile. “I write until my fingers bleed,” she says. “It’s all I can give them.”

The destruction of education is not just a loss of learning. It is a loss of identity. A loss of dreams. A loss of everything that makes recovery possible.

Journalists Killed, Truth Buried

At least 135 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023. Most were targeted alongside their families. Some were live on air. Others were assassinated hours after publishing eyewitness accounts.

Wael Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, lost his wife, son, daughter, and grandson. He returned to work the next day, still wearing blood-stained clothes. “If I don’t speak,” he said, “who will?”

Palestinian voices are being algorithmically erased on global platforms. Videos of dead children are flagged as misinformation. Reporters are deplatformed.

In war, the first casualty is truth. In Gaza, truth is buried under rubble, and those who dig it out are buried next.

Despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes, Israel faces no sanctions. No travel bans. No embargoes.

In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the threshold of “plausible genocide.” And yet, the bombings continue. The weapons are replenished. The funding flows. And Israel and Israelis don’t care? Does the world?

This is not just an Israeli failure. It is a global one—a betrayal by the very institutions meant to uphold international law.

Selective Humanity: Why Some Lives Are Grieved and Others Ignored

When hospitals in Ukraine were bombed, the world wept. When Gaza’s NICUs were incinerated, the world rationalized. When Syrian refugees drowned, headlines screamed. When Palestinian families are buried alive, the world shrugs.

Compassion cannot be selective. Human rights cannot be seasonal. Either they apply to all, or they mean nothing.

The silence from much of the international community—and from sectors of the agriculture and food world that know intimately the value of life—is not neutrality. It is abandonment.

Final Reflection: The Price of Silence

I write this not as an activist or politician, but as a human being. As a father. As a grandfather. As someone who has loved the soil and who knows what it means to protect the vulnerable.

There comes a moment in the life of every nation, every community, and every individual when silence becomes complicity. Not because we wish to cause harm, but because our refusal to confront it allows that harm to continue unchecked. That moment is now.

To be clear: silence is not neutrality. It is a decision. A posture. A retreat from responsibility disguised as restraint. And in the case of Gaza—where babies die from dehydration while convoys are blocked, where schools become graveyards, and where the international order crumbles in plain view—silence is a kind of death.

I am not a diplomat. I am a farmer by trade, an editor by calling, and a witness by necessity. I have spent my life writing about potatoes, about farming innovation, about the extraordinary people who feed the world. I know what it means to protect the fragile. I know what it means to kneel down in the dirt and believe in life.

And I know, beyond a doubt, that what is happening to Palestinian children is a desecration of that belief.

We live in an age where atrocities are livestreamed, where children’s final cries are captured in shaky phone footage and shared globally within minutes. We do not have the privilege of ignorance. We are not shielded by distance or delay. We know. We all know.

And still, we do not act?

Why?

Some fear controversy. Others fear loss—of status, of followers, of funding. But none of those losses compare to the loss of one child’s life. None.

If speaking out risks my reputation, I accept that cost. Because the greater risk is losing my humanity. The greater betrayal is abandoning the truth in a time when lies are easier to live with.

What does it mean, after all, to call ourselves stewards of the land—people who care for crops and soil and generations—if we turn our eyes from human beings being systematically starved, scarred, and erased?

What does it mean to write about sustainability and soil health, while infants lie under concrete slabs because the world refused to call a massacre by its name and do not act to bring an end to it?

And what legacy do we leave, as farmers, as writers, as people of conscience, if we cannot even speak for those who have lost their voice in the rubble?

History will not forget this moment. But more importantly, our children will not forget who we became in it. They will read our words—or note our lack of them. They will ask what we did. And what we didn’t do.

If we cannot protect children from bombs, from cages, from famine, and from abandonment—what can we protect them from?

The price of silence is high. It is paid in lives. In buried potential. In the slow erosion of moral clarity. It is paid in the normalization of death, until dead children are just numbers, statistics. Until rubble is just scenery. Until genocide is just another item in the news cycle.

And when that happens—when we accept the unthinkable as routine—we lose not only them. We lose ourselves.

So let us speak, while we can. Let us write, let us plant truth, let us water courage. Let us raise our voices like farmers raise crops—from the ground up, quietly but persistently, rooted in something deeper than fear.

This is not a Palestinian issue. It is not an Arab issue. It is a human issue. And it belongs to all of us.

I will continue to write about potatoes. I will continue to advocate for food justice and innovation.

But today, I write for the children. For those who are ignored. For those who remain, no matter how scarred and battered they are. And for the souls of all that we claim to stand for.

Because there is no harvest worth celebrating on a land where children are buried, instead of seeds.

Author: Lukie Pieterse – Editor and Publisher, Potato News Today