They Killed Hind. They Killed Amir.

With American bombs and Israeli impunity, childhood in Gaza is a death sentence

Six-year-old Hind Rajab and eight-year-old Amir may never have met, but they share an eerily similar story of horror and tragedy. Assassinated and slaughtered for sport by an army emboldened and armed by the US, they’ve become the symbolic faces of the genocide of Gaza and the decades-long oppression of Palestinians.

Hind and Amir’s stories aren't unique among the thousands of Palestinian children murdered in cold blood by the IDF — but the circumstances of their deaths have seared them into the world’s conscience.

This isn't a “conflict" - it's a one-sided military campaign imposed by Israel on a besieged, occupied civilian population, waged with overwhelming firepower, systematic starvation, and a calculated effort to crush Palestinian life to effect Israel's "final solution" - carried out with US diplomatic protection and military support, despite repeated international rulings warning of genocide.

On January 26, 2024, the ICJ concluded that “the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip appear to constitute a protected group” and face a “real and imminent risk” of genocide. The court ordered Israel to “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts” under the Genocide Convention, “enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”, and “prevent and punish” public incitement to genocide.

Eight months later, those orders were met with outright defiance. Gaza’s infrastructure lies in ruins, its population starves and displaced, and bombardment continues daily. Two children — Hind Rajab and Amir are living proof, in death, of what human rights groups and international legal bodies are now calling a deliberate campaign to annihilate a people.

Five days after the ICJ's ruling January 29, 2024, Hind, just five at the time was travelling with her family when Israeli tank fire ripped into their car in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood. Six of her relatives died instantly. Hind and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan, survived the initial strike.

From inside the bullet-riddled car, Hind called emergency services: “Please come… I’m scared… I don’t want to die.” Dispatchers stayed on the line for almost three hours as she described the bodies of her family members.

A Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance was dispatched to rescue her. It never arrived. It was later found destroyed by tank fire, its two paramedics killed. When rescuers finally reached the site after Israeli forces withdrew, Hind’s small body lay alongside her dead relatives and the medics sent to save her.

An investigation by Forensic Architecture and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor concluded: “The attack was deliberate… no plausible scenario exists in which the IDF did not know they were targeting civilians.”

In September 2024, the Hind Rajab Foundation was established in Brussels to pursue justice. By May 2025, it had filed war-crimes complaints with the ICC and multiple national courts, naming Lieutenant Colonel Beni Aharon of the IDF’s 401st Armoured Brigade as responsible.

In July this year, retired US Green Beret Lt. Col. Anthony “Tony” Aguilar, working with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), described what he called “a calculated campaign to kill civilians while starving them into submission.”

Aguilar met Amir, a barefoot eight-year-old who had walked 12 kilometres to reach a GHF food distribution point. The boy received half a bag of lentils and rice, clasped Aguilar’s hand, kissed it, and whispered: “Shukran” — thank you.

Minutes later, Israeli forces attacked.

“I saw tear gas, stun grenades, pepper spray — and then live rounds,” Aguilar testified. “Civilians were dropping to the ground. I saw Amir… he just fell forward. He’d been shot dead for the crime of collecting food.”

Aguilar estimates over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed at or near aid sites since May 2025, describing them as “death traps” — militarised with US- supplied weapons.

On July 29, 2025, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared:

“The worst-case famine scenario is now playing out in Gaza. Starvation is widespread, with an increasing number of hunger-related deaths.”

The IPC linked the famine to “severe restrictions on humanitarian access, destruction of agricultural capacity, and insecurity at distribution points.” These conditions mirror Aguilar’s testimony that aid sites were designed to be lethal.

A day earlier to the IPC's findings, Israel’s own human rights groups B’Tselemand Physicians for Human Rights Israel accused their government of genocide:

“Deliberate targeting of civilians, destruction of civilian infrastructure, forced displacement, starvation as a weapon, and rhetoric evincing an intent to destroy a national group.”

The ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for “starvation as a method of warfare” and “persecution” as crimes against humanity — charges made possible by the overwhelming evidence of deliberate policy, not battlefield accident.

Hind’s desperate “Please come” and Amir’s soft “thank you” now echo as moral indictments — not only of Israel’s war machine but of the US government that fuels it with weapons, vetoes, and political cover.

The Hind Rajab or Amir assassinations aren't isolated tragedies they are the deliberate products of a one-sided war whose architects know the cost in children’s lives and proceed regardless.

As the ICJ warned, the threat is “real and imminent.” Until the world enforces its own rulings, Hind and Amir will remain the tiny faces of a genocide carried out in plain sight — with American complicity.

The international community has failed Hind, Amir and the 1000’s of innocence slaughtered. The slaughter will continue and so will the IDF's depravity.