A Hypothetical Letter from Two Children in Gaza to the Children of America
By Ralph Nader
October 3, 2025
In Gaza, 200,000 Palestinian children have already been murdered by the Netanyahu regime, with American weapons. A survey last year by a British civic group found that 46% of the children in Gaza wanted to die, and over 95% believed they would be killed. This is not surprising. The Israeli genocidal regime has daily bombed tiny Gaza’s 2.3 million residents (the geographical size of Philadelphia) with the TNT equivalent of seven Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, smashing civilians and their infrastructure from water mains, electricity, fuel supplies, roads, agricultural crops, to hospitals, clinics, schools, housing, and bakeries into bits and pieces of flesh and debris.
Imagine the horror, the screams, starvation, chronic diseases, and untreated, bleeding injuries, the huge number of limbs amputated from children, most severed without any anesthesia.
Here is what a letter from the children living in the rubble of Gaza might say:
To the children of America – a plea for mercy from the adults in the United States. Our names are Yasmine and Ahmed, neighbors in Gaza City, and both of us are turning 12 next month, unless we are killed or die from starvation. We are weak, sick, and suffering from terrible dysentery from drinking dirty water. We are luckier than most children here, able to eat one small meal a day of lentils or canned peas. We have both lost our mothers and our sisters and brothers. They were killed in our apartments. Only our dear fathers are with us. They keep us alive by giving us much of their own small amounts of food.
Why are your leaders sending Israel the weapons that are killing us? Have you ever heard the terrifying whining of drones armed to kill above you, night and day? Can you imagine U.S.-made F-16s and tanks blowing up our homes and destroying everything in Gaza that kept people alive? Israeli snipers seem to be everywhere, aiming at babies, children, mothers, and fathers. We are innocent. The snipers have no feelings. To them, we are lambs to be slaughtered.
Please, if you are following the genocide in Gaza, don’t believe the reports that 20,000 of us have been killed. It is more like 200,000 of the 800,000 children in Gaza who have been deprived of their lives and dreams. Most have been buried in mass graves if they have not been blown apart by American missiles. Ahmed told me that he saw his seven-year-old sister, Nahedah, blown into hundreds of pieces in the rubble of their fifth-floor apartment. Her doll somehow was only broken in half, lying on her blood-soaked bed. She could never be properly buried. As American doctors volunteering here have said, the survivors are sick or dying from hunger and diseases.
Oh, children of America, you have great moral authority. Your pleas come from your hearts, your minds. We feel some hope when we see thousands of you marching or attending rallies all over America, calling for an end to the killing in Gaza and for a “Free Palestine.”
We know that the great majority of you have other things worrying you and drawing your attention. The obliteration of faraway Gaza is not on your screen. We hope you will join the protests to stop the destruction of our people.
The Palestinians have never threatened or harmed your country. Yet, your family is paying taxes to make the weapons killing us. We want to live, to grow up to fulfill our dreams – Yasmine wants to be a doctor, and Ahmed, a book reader, wants to be a journalist. We dream just the way you dream. We are filled with fear and know we may not survive. The stench of death is everywhere. Dogs and flies are eating the corpses of our neighbors and families in Gaza. There are no more morgues – they have all been bombed. Funerals are being directly attacked by tanks and planes. People praying in Mosques and Churches are blown up by the Israeli military.
You can make a difference. You can look your parents and your politicians in the eyes and ask why they are not stopping the genocide in Gaza. We know you can reach many other children through social media and start a wave of peace demands, a call for a ceasefire, and the deliveries by the thousands of trucks your parents have paid for waiting on the border with life-saving food, water, medicine, petrol, and equipment. Why allow the cruel Israeli government to block this nearby humanitarian aid?
Right now, flyers written in Arabic are dropping from Israeli planes ordering a million of us to leave our tents and crumbling homes in Gaza City for the fourth time. They say to go south to “safe zones.” There are no safe zones – there are no shelters, food, or water. The so-called safe zones have been bombed many times.
Our fathers do not know what to do – to stay and be killed or to leave on the roads of death to be killed. We are terrified. We remember the other times we were forced to flee to places like Khan Younis or Rafah, which now are rubble. Along the way, screaming, starving children and babies, all coughing, bleeding, families having to bury relatives who collapsed right on the side of the road. The Israelis have bulldozed our cemeteries for their use. Flies and mosquitoes, and blinding thick dust, are everywhere.
We may not be alive when you read this last desperate plea that you demand your powerful president to tell the Israelis to stop the killing and let in the trucks.
Millions of children in America can see our dying Gaza. You will remember forever how you saved what is left of us. So will we, the survivors, if there are any remaining to call you “the beloved ones.”