One thread, every collection
Children
The youngest of the record — documented children and their names.
67 entries across 13 collections
The Assassination of Ghassan Kanafani
1972
A Mossad car bomb in Beirut kills the novelist and PFLP spokesman Ghassan Kanafani, 36, and his seventeen-year-old niece Lamees — silencing the most celebrated literary voice of the Palestinian resistance.
The Expulsion of Lydda and Ramle
1948
Between the two UN truces of July 1948, Israeli forces took the twin cities of Lydda and Ramle and expelled their populations on foot toward the Arab lines. Close to a thousand people died in the cities and on the road.
The Shooting of Naji al-Ali
1987
The cartoonist who drew Handala — the barefoot refugee child with his back turned — is shot in a London street. He dies five weeks before the intifada his child witness seemed to foretell.
Abu Zurayq
Haifa · 1948
Abu Zurayq lay in the northern foothills of the bilad al-rawha', the fragrant country, twenty-four kilometres from Haifa, with a mosque, a boys' school and 550 people who had kept cordial relations with the neighbouring kibbutz of HaZore'a. The Palmach took it on 12 April 1948, held fifteen men and about 200 women and children, and expelled the women and children towards Jenin. Filastin reported that thirty houses were blown up, five of them still occupied. A resident of HaZore'a, Eliezer Bauer, recorded that most of the captured men were killed; his account was condemned at the kibbutz council.
Al-Khisas
Safad · 1948
Al-Khisas, on a terrace in the northern Hula plain, was raided by a Haganah strike force on the night of 18 December 1947 — one of the first such operations of the war. Houses were blown up and about a dozen civilians killed, four of them children by Benny Morris's figures, ten including five children according to the New York Times. Those who stayed on were finally driven out by army trucks at midnight on 5 June 1949 and dumped on a hillside near Akbara.
Al-Muzayri'a
Ramla · 1948
Al-Muzayri'a stood on a limestone hill at the end of the Ramallah heights, abandoned in the seventeenth century and resettled in the eighteenth by the al-Rumayh family from Deir Ghassaneh. Its boys' school drew children from the villages around, and a Roman mausoleum on its land had long since been made a mosque of al-Nabi Yahya. It was almost certainly taken during Operation Dani in mid-July 1948; the site is largely forested now.
Al-Nabi Rubin
Acre · 1948
Al-Nabi Rubin was a satellite of Tarbikha on a dome-shaped hill twenty-eight kilometres from Acre, gathered around the tomb of the prophet Rubin, its children walking to school in Tarbikha. In the second week of November 1948, after the fighting had stopped, the army ordered its people across the border into Lebanon; the Northern Front commander Moshe Carmel reported to Ben-Gurion on 16 November that he had been forced for military reasons to expel the border villages, and named it. The shrine is all that is left.
Al-Nahr
Acre · 1948
Al-Nahr, the twin of al-Tall, stood on a sandy mound fourteen kilometres from Acre built on archaeological debris going back to the eighteenth century BC, its 610 people working land of which 97 per cent was cultivable — 2,066 dunums in citrus and bananas alone. It was captured on 20–21 May 1948 in the second phase of Operation Ben-Ami. The day before, the commander of the Carmeli Brigade ordered his battalion commanders "to attack in order to conquer, to kill among the men, to destroy and burn the villages of Al Kabri, Umm al Faraj and An Nahr." Two houses remain.
Balad al-Shaykh
Haifa · 1948
Balad al-Shaykh, seven kilometres from Haifa, was the second largest village of its subdistrict with 4,120 people in 1944/45, and holds the grave of Izz al-Din al-Qassam. On 31 December 1947 a Palmach force of 170 men attacked it under orders to harm the largest possible number of men; more than sixty villagers were left for dead, women and children among them. The village was taken by the Carmeli Brigade on 24 April 1948 and is now Tel Hanan, part of Nesher.
Dayr Nakhkhas
Hebron · 1948
Dayr Nakhkhas was a village of 600 people on a limestone hilltop above Wadi Bayt Jibrin, whose children walked to school in the neighbouring villages. It was occupied on 29 October 1948 — the day of the massacre at al-Dawayima, which Morris records as setting off a mass flight from the area around it.
Najd
Gaza · 1948
Najd — its name means 'elevated ground' — was a small farming village northeast of Gaza whose children walked to school in Simsim. Its people were expelled by the Palmach's Negev Brigade on 13 May 1948, two days before the Mandate ended; Sderot was founded on its lands in 1951.
Nasir al-Din
Tiberias · 1948
Nasir al-Din was a village of ninety people three kilometres from Tiberias, attacked by two platoons of the Golani Brigade on 11 or 12 April 1948 as a demonstration intended to break the nerve of the city. Accounts of the dead range from eight men, one woman and an unspecified number of children in a British communiqué to ten in Arif al-Arif's account. Tiberias fell six days later; houses of the city now stand on the site.
Sa'sa'
Safad · 1948
Sa'sa' stood at 875 metres in the upper Galilee with 1,130 people and 14,796 dunums in 1944/45. A Palmach raid on 15 February 1948 blew up houses in the night under orders to destroy twenty and kill as many fighters as possible; the New York Times reported eleven villagers killed, five of them small children. The village was taken by the Seventh Brigade on 30 October during Operation Hiram, and kibbutz Sasa was founded on the site in 1949.
Sarafand al-'Amar
Ramla · 1948
Sarafand al-'Amar — Sarafand al-Kubra, the larger of the two Sarafands — held 1,950 people, the shrine of Luqman al-Hakim, and the al-Raja' orphanage for the children of Palestinians killed in the 1936–39 revolt, beside the largest British military base in the Middle East. The Giv'ati Brigade's Second Battalion probably took it on the night of 19–20 May 1948. The site is now a closed Israeli military area; no more than six houses remain.
Suruh
Acre · 1948
Suruh was a hamlet on a rocky hill above Tarbikha, twenty-eight and a half kilometres from Acre, a kilometre from the village whose school its children attended and whose services it used. It was among the first communities expelled in the army's campaign to clear the northern border in the second week of November 1948. Morris's account does not say whether its people were forced into Lebanon or trucked elsewhere inside Israel; for weeks afterwards the army raided the emptied villages to make sure nobody had returned.
Zarnuqa
Ramla · 1948
Zarnuqa was a citrus village of 2,380 ringed on every side by fruit trees watered from its own wells, with a clinic, two schools and a Saturday market that drew merchants from Jaffa, Lydda and Ramla. The Giv'ati Brigade occupied it on 27 May 1948 during Operation Barak; a letter published in the Mapam newspaper 'Al ha-Mishmar described the killing of an old man, an old woman and a child, and the expulsion of the rest toward Yibna. The village was destroyed outright that June.
Acre
Western Galilee coast
Acre — Akka — is the walled city that broke Napoleon: a Phoenician port, the Crusaders' last capital, and an Ottoman citadel-town whose Old City is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Most of its people were expelled in 1948; among its exiled children was Ghassan Kanafani.
al-Bireh
Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, central West Bank
Ramallah's Muslim twin, at the top of the Jerusalem road — a Canaanite name meaning the wells, a Crusader church, 35,910 people in the 2007 census, and the Israeli Civil Administration's West Bank headquarters sitting on 1,422 dunums of its confiscated land.
Ramallah
Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, central West Bank
Ramallah, twin city of al-Bireh in the hills north of Jerusalem, grew from a sixteenth-century Christian village into the de facto administrative capital of Palestine — seat of the Authority, home of its cultural life, and the burial place of Mahmoud Darwish.
Abdel Mahdi al-Wuheidi
Bir al-Saba (Beersheba)
Driven from Bir al-Saba as a child in 1948 and from Jabalia camp in 2023, he returned after the October 2025 ceasefire to a house standing in rubble.
Abed Abdi
Haifa
A six-year-old expelled from Haifa in April 1948 recalls the crowds fleeing to the port; he returned with his family three years later and became a renowned visual artist.
Dalal Nassar
Julis
An 84-year-old refugee from Julis recalls walking to Gaza as a girl during the 1948 exodus and the humiliation of the first years in tents at Deir al-Balah.
Fahimi Zeidan
Deir Yassin
A twelve-year-old survivor of the 9 April 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin describes the killing of her family, in a statement recorded by British police officers days after the attack.
Ghada Karmi
Qatamon, Jerusalem
A Jerusalem childhood ended in April 1948: days after Deir Yassin, nine-year-old Ghada Karmi's family packed a few summer clothes and left their Qatamon home, believing they would be back within weeks.
Muhammad Abu Hana
al-Tantura
A twelve-year-old during the assault on al-Tantura in May 1948 describes the roundup on the beach that preceded the killing of scores of the village's men.
Omar Abedelal
Burayr
A nine-year-old when Burayr was besieged and depopulated in 1948, he recalls the farmland his family had worked for generations and the return they never stopped expecting.
Reja-e Busailah
Lydda
A visually impaired teenager during the July 1948 expulsion from Lydda, he recalls being herded east on foot in the exodus that became known as the Lydda death march.
Yacoub Odeh
Lifta, Jerusalem
An eight-year-old when Lifta was emptied in early 1948, he recalls fleeing with nothing but the clothes his family wore, certain they would be back the next day.
Abdel Jalil Al-Fayoumi
Survivor of the 'flour massacre' on al-Rashid Street
Abdel Jalil Al-Fayoumi, 22, survived the February 29, 2024 'flour massacre,' in which at least 112 Palestinians were killed around an aid convoy in Gaza City; after hours of searching he found the body of his 15-year-old cousin Moatasem at Al-Shifa Hospital.
Awni Eldous
Twelve-year-old who dreamed of YouTube fame
Awni Eldous, a 12-year-old who ran a small gaming channel and dreamed of reaching a million subscribers, was among 15 people — seven of them children — killed in an Israeli airstrike on a residential building in Gaza City in the war's first hours, the BBC and Haaretz reported.
Eleen Muammar
Three-year-old killed in the al-Mawasi tent massacre
Eleen Muammar, three, was killed when Israeli missiles struck tents sheltering displaced families in al-Mawasi — an area Israel had designated a 'humanitarian zone'; her father dug his wife and daughters from the sand, and footage of the family mourning her small shrouded body spread around the world.
Hala Khreis
Retired teacher shot dead while fleeing with her white-flag-carrying grandson
Hala Khreis, 57, a retired Arabic teacher, was shot in the chest and killed on November 12, 2023, as she fled Gaza City's al-Rimal neighborhood on foot at the front of a column of civilians waving white flags, holding the hand of her four-year-old grandson Tayem; her family said Israeli forces fired the shot, and a CNN investigation found Israeli troops had been stationed as close as 200 meters away.
Hind Rajab
Six-year-old from Gaza City
Hind Rajab, six, was killed with six relatives when Israeli tank fire hit their car as they fled Tel al-Hawa, after she spent hours on the phone with Red Crescent dispatchers pleading for rescue; the two paramedics sent to save her were also killed, and forensic investigators concluded a tank fired on the car from as close as 13 metres.
Ibrahim Abu Shaaban
Six-year-old killed with ten members of his family when their truck was attacked a week into the ceasefire
Ibrahim Ihab Abu Shaaban, six, was one of eleven members of the Abu Shaaban family — seven of them children — killed around 3 p.m. on October 17, 2025, when Israeli forces attacked the pickup truck carrying the family through Gaza City's al-Zeitoun neighborhood, one week after the ceasefire took effect; the Israeli military told the BBC the vehicle had crossed the 'yellow line' and troops 'opened fire to remove the threat.'
Omar Yasser al-Jabri
Thirteen-year-old who died of his burns three days after the al-Taba'een school strike
Omar Yasser al-Jabri, 13, was critically burned in the August 10, 2024 strike on the al-Taba'een school during dawn prayers — the strike that killed his mother and brother — and died of his wounds three days later.
Rakan al-Najjar
Ten-year-old killed with eight of his siblings in the strike on the al-Najjar family home
Rakan, ten, was one of nine children of doctors Alaa and Hamdi al-Najjar killed when an Israeli airstrike hit the family home in Khan Younis; his name — Rakan Hamdi Yahya al-Najjar, ten years old — appears on the Gaza health authorities' list of the war dead published by The Guardian.
Reem Ali Khalil Badwan
Three-year-old whose grandfather's farewell moved the world
Palestinian records identify her as Reem Ali Khalil Badwan, widely reported as Reem Nabhan. She and her five-year-old brother, Tariq Ali Khalil Badwan, were killed in an Israeli strike in Nuseirat in late November 2023; published accounts disagree on the precise day and whether the family home or a neighbouring building was struck.
Refaat Alareer
Poet, professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, editor of 'Gaza Writes Back'
Refaat Alareer, 44, was killed with his brother, his sister and four of her children in an Israeli airstrike on his sister's home, a day after a threatening phone call prompted him to leave the shelter where he had been staying; his final poem, 'If I Must Die,' spread across the world after his death.
Sidra al-Najjar
The baby of the al-Najjar family, killed with eight of her siblings in the strike on their home
Sidra, the infant daughter of doctors Alaa and Hamdi al-Najjar, was killed with eight of her siblings on May 23, 2025, when an Israeli airstrike destroyed the family home in Khan Younis while her mother was on duty at Nasser Hospital; CNN, citing the children's cousin, described her as the breastfed baby of the family and reported the missing infant as seven months old — the Guardian and Drop Site News instead identified the family's six-month-old as her sister Sayden.
Sidra Hassouna
Five-year-old killed with her family in Rafah
Sidra, five, was killed with eight relatives when an Israeli airstrike destroyed the house her displaced family was renting in Rafah; a photograph of her body, left hanging from the ruins by the force of the blast, circulated worldwide as an image of the war's toll on children.
Suwar al-Jamasi
Four-year-old killed with eight relatives in the strike on the al-Jamasi family home
Suwar Obeida al-Jamasi, four, was killed before dawn on March 18, 2025, when an Israeli airstrike destroyed the al-Jamasi family home in Gaza City's al-Sabra neighborhood, killing nine members of the family including four children; the Israeli military confirmed the strike, saying it killed her grandfather, Hamas political-bureau member Muhammad Daoud al-Jamasi, while Airwars recorded the four children and three women among the dead.
Suzan Hassouna
Five-year-old twin killed with her sister Sidra and their family in Rafah
Suzan, five, was killed with her twin sister Sidra, her baby brother Malek, her parents and her grandparents when Israeli airstrikes destroyed the house her displaced family was renting in Rafah; her uncle identified her body by the small purse she always slept with.
Tawfic Abdel Jabbar
Palestinian-American high-school senior from Louisiana
Tawfic Abdel Jabbar, 17, a Louisiana native spending a year in his family's ancestral West Bank village, was shot in the head by Israeli fire while driving a pickup truck on a dirt road hundreds of meters from the highway; the sole witness called the shooting unprovoked, and the White House demanded a transparent investigation.
Tayem Khreis
Boy filmed waving a white flag beside his grandmother Hala Khreis when she was shot
Tayem, four, was walking a few paces ahead of the crowd, holding his grandmother Hala Khreis's hand with a white flag in his other hand, when she was shot dead beside him on November 12, 2023, during the flight from Gaza City's al-Rimal neighborhood; separated from his family in the chaos, he reached the south with acquaintances and was later found in Rafah.
Yahya al-Najjar
Twelve-year-old killed with eight of his siblings in the strike on the al-Najjar family home
Yahya, twelve, was the eldest of the nine children of doctors Alaa and Hamdi al-Najjar killed when an Israeli airstrike destroyed the family home in Khan Younis; his mother, a pediatrician on duty at Nasser Hospital, ran home to find the house on fire, and his father died of his wounds nine days later.
Elias Sanbar
Historian, translator, and diplomat · 1947–
Carried out of Haifa as an infant in 1948, he became the historian of Palestinian photography, Darwish's French translator, and Palestine's ambassador to UNESCO.
Hind al-Husseini
Educator and founder of Dar al-Tifl al-Arabi · 1916–1994
The Jerusalem educator who opened her home to children displaced from Deir Yasin in 1948 and built that act of care into Dar al-Tifl al-Arabi.
Naji al-Ali
Political cartoonist, creator of Handala · c. 1938–1987
The Arab world's most beloved political cartoonist, whose barefoot child Handala became the conscience of Palestine.
Rim Banna
Singer and composer · 1966–2018
The Nazareth singer who went looking for the Palestinian children's songs that were being forgotten, recorded them, and set modern Palestinian poetry to her own melodies.
I Grant You Refuge
Hiba Abu Nada · 2023
One of Hiba Abu Nada's final poems, written on 10 October 2023: an invocation that tries to shelter children, parents, streets, houses, and oranges inside language.
Morning Song
Naomi Shihab Nye · 2019
Written for Janna Jihad, the child who began documenting occupation with her mother's phone at age seven: the 'tiny journalist' sees everything — and 'she's bigger than you are.'
We Teach Life, Sir
Rafeef Ziadah · 2011
Ziadah's answer to a journalist who asked if Palestinians would 'just stop teaching their children to hate' — a spoken-word poem that became one of the most shared performances of Palestinian poetry ever recorded.
A Long Walk from Gaza
Asmaa Alatawna · 2024
A coming-of-age novel about a girl seeking freedom from occupation, patriarchy, and the estrangement of exile.
A Mountainous Journey: A Poet's Autobiography
Fadwa Tuqan · 1990
The autobiography of the poet of Nablus — a girl pulled out of school by the constraints of her own society, taught poetry at home by her brother, and turned by 1967 into the voice of a country.
Mapping My Return: A Palestinian Memoir
Salman Abu Sitta · 2016
The engineer who mapped every depopulated village of Palestine, on how a ten-year-old expelled from the Beersheba district spent a lifetime turning loss into cartography.
They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom
Ahed Tamimi and Dena Takruri · 2022
The memoir of Ahed Tamimi, jailed at sixteen after a viral confrontation with Israeli soldiers — a girlhood in Nabi Saleh and an intimate portrait of life under occupation.
Desmond Tutu: Israeli Apartheid is Worse Than South Africa's
Desmond Tutu
I have witnessed the systemic humiliation of Palestinian men, women and children by members of the Israeli security forces.
Haydar Abd al-Shafi at Madrid: We Come to You From a Tortured Land
Haydar Abd al-Shafi
We come to you from a tortured land and a proud, though captive people, having been asked to negotiate with our occupiers, but leaving behind the children of the intifada, and a people under occupation and under curfew who enjoined us not to surrender or forget.
The Abu Ghazaleh family
Jaffa · 20th century to present
A Jaffa mercantile family scattered by 1948 — oil dealers and ice makers whose ten-year-old son Talal walked out of the city a refugee and built the Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization in exile, spending a career insisting that the record show his birthplace as Jaffa.
The Abu Khdeir family
Shu'fat, Jerusalem · Documented in Shu'fat's own records; prominent since the 20th century
One of the principal hamayil of Shu'fat, the village on the ridge north of Jerusalem — named as such by the town's own services committee. In July 2014 two of its children, one from Shu'fat and one from Tampa, Florida, made the family's name known everywhere: Mohammed Abu Khdeir, sixteen, was seized near his home and burned alive; his cousin Tariq was beaten unconscious by Israeli police at a protest the next day.
Handala
symbol
Naji al-Ali's barefoot refugee child, back turned to the viewer, who has watched over Palestinian political cartoons since 1969.
Songs of the 1936 Revolt
music
During the Great Palestinian Rebellion the fighters' communication system ran partly on singing. Women passed British troop movements along in chants that sounded like children's rhymes, and a printer's apprentice from Haifa turned the whole revolt into colloquial verse.
The Palestinian Hikaye
tradition
The winter-evening tale told by women to women and children — a folk narrative form inscribed by UNESCO in 2008, and a critique of society delivered from inside the household.
Defense for Children International — Palestine (DCIP)
DCIP
DCIP documents the detention, killing, and maiming of Palestinian children by Israeli forces and advocates for their rights under international law.
Know Their Names: the children killed in Israel's war on Gaza
Al Jazeera Interactive
Al Jazeera's interactive memorial to the more than ten thousand children killed in Gaza — built from the Ministry of Health's named lists, presented child by child with names and ages, so that a statistic that defeats comprehension becomes a register of individual lives. One of the essential companion records to this archive's own Registry.
Trapped — Gaza's children before this war, after fifteen years of blockade
Save the Children International
Save the Children's 2022 report, a repeat of its own 2018 research, consulting 488 children and 168 caregivers in the Gaza Strip. Four in five children reported living with depression, grief and fear — sixteen months before October 2023. It is the baseline the current figures should be read against.
Where this thread crosses others
Counted on records the two threads actually share, not on words they have in common.
A thread is a reading order, not a boundary — every record above belongs to other threads too.