“The Children,” James Baldwin Wrote, “Are Always Ours, Every Single One of Them"

A nurse hurriedly asserted ​“I don’t like the way he looks” to each new person who came in. My wife was sitting to the side, stunned.

They hooked my son back up to his monitors and the reality of the situation set in. Normal blood-oxygen levels for a toddler are 95% or more. His had dropped to 55%.

“He looks ashen,” a nurse said into a phone. I didn’t know who she was talking to. He looked green to me. More doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists from the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) arrived. I counted almost a dozen people. No one assured us he would be okay.

They stuck two more needles into his hand and arm and there was no response. No screams. No cries. No tears. ​“He didn’t flinch,” one of the doctors said, ​“I don’t like that.”

My wife broke down. I pulled her close and hugged her. They whisked our baby away to the ICU. I knew he was fighting for his life.

In the ICU, they hooked him up to a high-pressure mask that forced his airways open so oxygen could get in and carbon dioxide could get out. Slowly, color returned to his face.

The next 36 hours were still tough, but once things settled down and it was just the three of us in the room, my wife and I turned to our phones to update our families about what had happened. When I inevitably looked at my social media feeds, my mind was transported to Palestine. My feeds had been saturated with scenes from the genocide in Gaza for the previous nine months — that day was no exception.

My son’s crisis in the hospital began on July 6, and that same day the Israeli army killed Palestinian children and their loved ones after firing missiles at a school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central part of Gaza.

My relief at my son’s recovery mixed with intense sorrow and guilt. Our baby was alive because he was receiving top-notch care in one of the best children’s hospitals in the country. The parents of Gaza essentially had no hospitals left to care for their sick and injured children.

According to figures released on October 22 by the Gaza Health Ministry, nearly 43,000 people have been killed in the genocide so far. In September, when the ministry released the names and ages of those who had been killed up to that point, children accounted for roughly one third of the deaths officials had been able to fully identify. However, these numbers, horrific as they are, do not even begin to capture the full scale of the devastation in Gaza.

A study in the Lancet medical journal looking at the ​“indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence” in armed conflicts found that ​“indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths.” That means the full death toll is certainly far, far higher and is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands.

The implications of these numbers should be unfathomable, yet they are playing out before our eyes. A report by the United Nations Children’s Fund UNICEF found that by April 2024, 90% of all children in Gaza lacked the food they needed for their ​“survival, growth and development.” Israel is starving them to death.

When my wife and I didn’t know if our son would make it, it felt like the walls of the world were rapidly closing on us. Our world got so small that it fit into his tiny body. When I think about our pain in that moment, and then I think about the Gazan parents and what they have been going through for the past year, words generally fail me. We love our son more than anything in the world. We don’t love him more than Palestinian parents love their children. Their love, loss and pain are crushing.

I cried while writing this article because thinking about how close we came to losing my son is too painful. When I swipe through the photos on my phone and stumble on pictures from his hospital stay, my heart drops because it’s hard to see him so visibly sick. My brain will not let me process what life must be like for Palestinian parents living through a holocaust. It’s too unbearable. Yet they have to bear it.

Back at the hospital, my son’s overnight nurse in the ICU took great care of all three of us. She checked in on our baby at least every hour. Every time she came into our room, she answered all our questions, no matter how frivolous or redundant. She knew we were scared, and she went above and beyond to try to calm our fears and make us feel comfortable. She even sat with us and kept us company late at night.

The next morning, towards the end of her 12-hour shift, my wife asked the nurse if she was Arab because she noticed the necklace she was wearing had her name written in Arabic. She told us she was Palestinian.

That took my breath away. Images of the genocide raced through my mind and I felt both sad and ashamed at once. While this woman was treating some of the sickest children in the United States, our government was using her tax dollars to supply the weapons that had destroyed nearly every hospital in Gaza. The juxtaposition was jarring. She was pulling out all the stops to comfort us and assure us our baby was in safe hands, while we were paying for the weapons used to kill doctors and nurses — just like her — in her homeland.

As our son recovered over the next day, we were faced with a new challenge: the better he felt, the more he protested the countless tubes attached to his body and the mask blowing pressurized air down his throat. Aside from a few sips of water, he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink in two days.

He called out for water. When we told him he couldn’t have any, he shrieked and it broke my heart — and took my mind back to Palestine. We felt so helpless not being able to give him water even though we knew he was being hydrated intravenously. How helpless, I thought, must parents in Gaza feel hearing their kids cry for water and food knowing they will ultimately die of thirst and starvation?

I wasn’t prepared for parenting during a livestreamed genocide. I know that is a very privileged thing to say from the comfort of my home, knowing that the traumatic images on my phone are real life for the people in Gaza. But since the genocide began, my every joy is tinged with guilt. My child’s every little heartbreak is immediately dwarfed by the images on my phone. The people behind the images. Entire universes caving in.

What sets this genocide apart from others is that we are seeing the brutality of it as it is happening. In her poignant meditation, ​“On Parenthood and Genocide,” Heba Gowayed writes, ​“I am haunted by the images and videos of parents in Gaza with their children, by the love and grief comprising these figures. … But most of all, and along with other parents who protest the genocide and the mass murder of children in their identity as parents, I am haunted because I am a mother.”

Most of us living in the United States are largely experiencing the genocide as a series of images and videos. They are utterly devastating in every way imaginable. But, like Gowayed, the stories that completely destroy me are those of parents grieving their dead children. I have been organizing against war and militarism for more than 20 years. I have been organizing as a parent for just two.

As a father, when I think about the parents forced to live through the atrocities in those images and videos my heart races, my eyes well up, and my entire body convulses with rage. Those images are seared in my brain, and they flash before my eyes throughout the day, every day — especially when my son cries because he is hurt or scared.

My little boy was released from the hospital after four days, but he was back the very next month. He got his ear snipped when he moved suddenly during a haircut. When I saw what turned out to be just a tiny piece of skin hanging loose from his ear, it wrecked me. As I hugged him and his blood stained my shirt, I thought of a tweet I had seen about a Palestinian mother hugging her child’s corpse with pieces of their brain hanging out from their head.

At the emergency room, they told us they would cut the loose skin off his ear, and it would just grow back normally. But they decided to cut it off without using an anesthetic. As I watched my baby writhe with pain when they cut off a piece of his ear, every cell in my body cried out in horror. I thought of the surgeon in Gaza who had to amputate his own son’s leg without anesthesia, only to have his son die from the pain.

“The children,” James Baldwin wrote, ​“are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

As parents of some of the most privileged children in the history of the world, we have a responsibility to do the impossible: value the lives of Palestinian children as much as our own. While we’re struggling to get by over here and juggling our jobs and childcare, we must fight like hell for the children of Palestine and the world that is collapsing around them. Their parents, families and friends. Their homes, schools and hospitals. Their parks, playgrounds and soccer fields. We have to fight for a Palestine in which they can find joy, dream big and thrive. Just like we fight for our own children — day in and day out.