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The idea that a massacre of children can change the course of a war is unfounded. A war only ends or escalates to its fullest extent because this has already been decided long ago. I write this from experience against the background of the conflict in the Middle East.
On 30 July 2006, I was filming the many children who died in the Israeli bombing of a house in the small village of Cana, in southern Lebanon. I thought that perhaps these images, mine and those of my colleagues, would stop the war. The war stopped two weeks later. Did these scenes put it out? No. Why, you ask? I answer: because that war was running out of steam of its own accord.
The world is holding its breath: will the images of the 12 Druze children blown to pieces on a football field by a rocket attributed to Hezbollah in the village of Majdal Chams, located in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, lead to all-out war betweenTel Aviv and the Lebanese Shia movement? My answer is no. If I am wrong, I will humbly admit it.
The death of children in war does not matter to anyone: it is only taken as a pretext to justify its end or its unleashing. In both cases, everything has long since been decided.
On 7 October, Hamas and other Palestinian groups killed Jewish-Israeli children as they crossed from the Gaza Strip. Why? Israel, in the war campaign unleashed immediately afterwards and still ongoing, has killed thousands of Palestinian children in the Strip (and some even in the West Bank), according to the figures we have. Why?
Has anyone stood up and demanded that this war should end? Does anyone recognise its ferocious absurdity, given the scenario before our eyes?
Were the Israeli children killed on 7 October by Palestinian armed groups claiming the blood of Palestinian children, so that theirs would not be spilled in vain? And did Hamas ask Palestinian children for permission to be sacrificed on the altar of resistance?
I have seen children die in war, not only Israelis and not only Palestinians.
I always thought, filming their bodies, that that image, after being broadcast on television or published somewhere, would produce the only reaction that made sense: to stop the war. It did not produce it.
Never.
(gianluca grossi)