Children
The youngest of the record — documented children and their names.
65 entries across 14 collections
Research1
Poetry2
Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud
1913–1948
The 'martyr poet' — a schoolteacher who wrote of carrying his soul in his palm and was killed in battle at al-Shajara in July 1948.
Naomi Shihab Nye
1952–
A Palestinian-American poet of tenderness and attention, Nye writes of her father's lost Palestine and of the small exchanges that keep people human.
Voices1
Figures6
Elias Sanbar
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.
Khalil al-Sakakini
1878–1953
Jerusalem teacher who built a school without grades or punishments, and kept a diary for forty-five years that is now one of the fullest private records of Palestinian life before 1948.
Mahmoud Hamshari
1938–1973
The schoolteacher from Umm Khalid who became the PLO's first representative in Paris, wounded by an explosive device planted by Israeli intelligence on 8 December 1972; he died of his injuries a month later.
Naji al-Ali
c. 1938–1987
The Arab world's most beloved political cartoonist, whose barefoot child Handala became the conscience of Palestine.
Razan al-Najjar
1996–2018
A 21-year-old volunteer paramedic from Khan Younis, shot dead by an Israeli sniper while tending to wounded protesters in Gaza in 2018.
Rim Banna
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.
Timeline2
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.
Culture2
Handala
Naji al-Ali's barefoot refugee child, back turned to the viewer, who has watched over Palestinian political cartoons since 1969.
The Palestinian Hikaye
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.
Poems3
Morning Song
Naomi Shihab Nye
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.'
The Martyr
Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud
Written by a schoolteacher in his twenties who was killed in battle eleven years later — the poem that earned Abd al-Rahim Mahmoud the name 'the martyr poet.'
We Teach Life, Sir
Rafeef Ziadah
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.
Glossary1
Memory14
Al-Bassa
Acre
Al-Bassa was a large, prosperous Muslim-Christian village on the Lebanese border — a regional market center with schools, churches, and mosques. Punished by the British with a massacre in 1938, it was stormed by the Haganah in May 1948 and almost completely razed; its ruins lie inside Shlomi and Betzet.
Al-Birwa
Acre
Al-Birwa, on a rocky hill east of Acre, was a farming village of some 1,500 people — Muslims and Christians — and the birthplace of the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Captured in July 1948, it was destroyed almost entirely; a school, two shrines, and three houses are all that remain.
Al-Khalasa
Beersheba
Al-Khalasa was built by Muslim Bedouin of the Azazma tribe in the early twentieth century among the ruins of Elusa, the Nabataean and Byzantine city that had been the capital of Palaestina Tertia. It stood twenty-three kilometres from Bir al-Sabi', with an elementary school opened in 1941. Its people were displaced in the war of 1948; the Negev Brigade held the area, and the site is now used for military training.
Al-Khayriyya
Jaffa
Al-Khayriyya — the Assyrian Banai Berka and Roman Beneberak, renamed 'the good, the giving' under the Mandate to distinguish it from Bnei Brak — dug trenches against attack from December 1947 before the Alexandroni Brigade seized it on 29 April 1948 in the encirclement of Jaffa. A handful of houses and a school survive within Giv'atayim's suburbs.
Al-Khisas
Safad
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-Sarafand
Ramla
Al-Sarafand — Sarafand al-Kharab — was a citrus village beside the great British camp on the Ramla plain, burned by British forces in the late 1920s and rebuilt, only to be emptied in April 1948 as fighting closed in. Nes Ziona has spread over its lands, but many houses and the village school remain.
Amqa
Acre
Amqa was a small Muslim village in the hills northeast of Acre, identified with the Talmudic Kefar Amiqo. It was captured in July 1948 during Operation Dekel and largely destroyed — only its mosque and school were left standing, used as warehouses by the moshav founded on its lands.
Balad al-Shaykh
Haifa
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.
Beit Dajan
Jaffa
Beit Dajan — biblical Beth Dagon — stood at the crossroads south of Jaffa, a citrus village of nearly four thousand people with two schools. Raided through the winter of 1948, it fell in Operation Hametz at the end of April; a moshav took its name and its lands, and one surviving house serves as a synagogue.
Isdud
Gaza
Isdud — ancient Ashdod — was a market town of nearly five thousand on the coastal highway north of Gaza, with two mosques, three shrines, schools, a train station, and a Wednesday market. It was the Egyptian army's northernmost stand of 1948, falling in late October during Operation Yoav; modern Ashdod rose on its lands.
Najd
Gaza
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
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.
Qaqun
Tulkarm
Qaqun, crowned by a Crusader-Mamluk fortress northwest of Tulkarm, was stormed by the Alexandroni Brigade in June 1948 in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, fought trench-to-trench against Iraqi defenders. Some villagers held on in their homes into 1949; the fortress and the school still stand above its orchards.
Sa'sa'
Safad
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.
Places4
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.
Nazareth
Lower Galilee
Nazareth — al-Nasira, the childhood home of Jesus — is the city that survived 1948: ordered emptied, it was spared by a single officer's refusal, and grew into the largest Palestinian city in Israel and the cultural capital of the Palestinians of '48.
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.
Tiberias
Sea of Galilee
Tiberias — Tabariyya — was sacred to Jews since the Sanhedrin sat by its shore, and Palestine's most evenly mixed city, until April 1948, when its entire Arab population was convoyed out in two days. The childhood town of Fayez Sayegh; most of its Ottoman old city was later demolished.
Arguments1
Testimonies12
Abdel Mahdi al-Wuheidi
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
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
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
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
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.
Ibrahim Abu-Lughod
A nineteen-year-old Jaffa high-school student, he sat his matriculation exams in March 1948 under nightly mortar bombardment — 'Daily we knew people who got killed. We buried them.' — and weeks later fled the falling city by sea.
Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif
A 91-year-old survivor from Julis, in the Gaza district, recalls his family's expulsion in 1948 and a lifetime in the refugee camps of Bureij and Nuseirat.
Muhammad Abu Hana
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.
Mutlaq Mahmoud Abu Elkhair
A 96-year-old survivor from Barqa, depopulated in May 1948, recalls walking down the coast into Gaza with his family, expecting to be home again within days.
Omar Abedelal
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.
Wajiha al-Harsh
An 80-year-old refugee from Jaffa, living in the Jabaliya camp's 'Jaffa neighborhood' in Gaza, recalls the panic of the May 1948 flight from her city.
Yacoub Odeh
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.
Gaza names15
Abdel Jalil Al-Fayoumi
c. 2001–
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
c. 2011–2023
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.
Eyad al-Hallaq
c. 1988–2020
Eyad al-Hallaq, 32, was shot dead by Israeli border police in Jerusalem's Old City while walking to the special-needs school where he studied and worked; he was cornered in a garbage shed and shot after his counselor's warnings that he was disabled — the officer who fired was charged with reckless manslaughter and acquitted in 2023.
Hala Khreis
c. 1965–2023
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.
Ibrahim Abu Shaaban
c. 2019–2025
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.'
Majdi al-Tatar
c. 1980–2024
Majdi al-Tatar, 44, a member of the Palestinian Paralympic swimming team who lost a leg at age ten and became one of Gaza's best-known swimming coaches, was killed in the Israeli strike on the al-Taba'een school shelter during dawn prayers.
Omar Yasser al-Jabri
c. 2011–2024
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
c. 2015–2025
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 Nabhan
c. 2020–2023
Reem Nabhan, three, was killed with her five-year-old brother Tarek when an Israeli airstrike hit the family home in Nuseirat as they slept; footage of her grandfather Khaled cradling her body and calling her 'the soul of my soul' was seen around the world.
Refaat Alareer
1979–2023
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
c. 2024–2025
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
c. 2018–2024
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
c. 2021–2025
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
c. 2018–2024
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.
Yahya al-Najjar
c. 2013–2025
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.