A Palestinian father has buried his sons. A mother is rebuilding her relationship with a daughter separated from her as a premature baby. Journalists have been killed while wearing press vests and carrying cameras. Children who survived Israeli bombs are growing up without limbs, homes, parents or the world they knew before October 2023.
Three years after October 7, Gaza’s catastrophe cannot adequately be told through numbers alone. It lives in empty bedrooms, in parents who survived when their children did not, and in the silence left behind when a journalist who documented everybody else’s death becomes the next body carried from the rubble.
And yet the numbers themselves are staggering. UNICEF reported that at least 21,700 children had been killed in Gaza by the end of June 2026. Another 45,000 had been injured, including more than 11,000 left with life-altering injuries, while around 1.3 million people remained displaced.
For former Guantanamo Bay detainee and CAGE International senior director Moazzam Begg, the anniversary cannot be reduced to one morning in Israeli history while everything that followed is pushed into the margins.
Speaking to One Nation Media (ONM), Begg said: “October the 7th is extremely important, not just because of Hamas’ attack, but because of the reaction by the Israeli military.”
That reaction has reshaped almost every aspect of Palestinian life in Gaza. Homes became graves. Hospitals were attacked and overwhelmed. Universities were destroyed. Entire families were wiped out. Children learnt the language of drones, displacement and bereavement before they learnt the ordinary language of childhood.
Gaza’s children, grieving families and silenced journalists
Dr Said Al Namrouti of the Islamic University of Gaza describes that grief in deeply personal terms.
“I lost my sons, and with them, I lost parts of my heart,” he wrote. “I lost my home, my money, and so much of what once gave life its meaning and warmth.”
His words capture something casualty statistics cannot.
“Grief is no longer simply a tear or a broken spirit. It has become a silent companion I walk with, carrying the names of those I loved in my heart wherever I go.”
Yet he continues, not because the pain has passed, but because memory itself has become a form of endurance.
“Not because I have overcome loss, but because those who are gone deserve for me to continue living with their dignity, and to remain faithful to what they loved and believed in.”
That same wound runs through Gaza’s youngest generation. Bissan al-Kurd was born six weeks prematurely after an Israeli strike seriously injured her mother and killed her unborn sister. She was evacuated from Gaza in an incubator alongside 28 other premature babies. Seven later died in Egypt.
Bissan survived, but survival meant separation. When she returned to Gaza in March 2026, she had to begin forming a relationship with the mother from whom war had separated her.
This is what three years of war have meant for Gaza’s children: even survival can leave wounds that last a lifetime.
The journalists who documented that suffering have also paid an extraordinary price. The Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded more than 200 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Palestinian reporters continued filming bombings, entering hospitals, recording displacement and documenting the dead while their own families were being killed and uprooted.
They were not simply names added to another casualty list. They were the witnesses.
October 7: A history of occupation and resistance
Speaking to ONM, Begg challenged the framing of October 7 as though Palestinian history began that morning.
“The Palestinians had every right to do what they did on October the 7th. Not my words, but the words of Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.”
Begg was referring to retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell and a longstanding critic of US and Israeli foreign policy.
Begg continued: “Wilkerson had served as the Chief of Staff to US Secretary of State Colin Powell and had helped to draft the evidence, the false evidence that was presented at the United Nations that became the key justification for the invasion of Iraq.”
For Begg, the significance lies in who is making the argument.
“When a man like this talks about Israel’s role in the targeting and destruction of Palestinians and justifies the attacks on October the 7th, people really need to take note.”
International humanitarian law prohibits deliberate attacks on civilians and hostage-taking, irrespective of the cause invoked. But neither can October 7 erase the decades of occupation, dispossession, siege and repeated military assaults that preceded it.
For Palestinians, history did not begin when Israelis were killed.
The Holocaust, genocide and the world’s failure to act
Begg also places Gaza within a wider historical context. In his conversation with ONM, he referred to Heinrich Himmler, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, who was born on October 7, 1900, and to the Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners who revolted against their Nazi captors at Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 7, 1944.
His wider argument concerns the meaning of historical suffering and the selective application of its lessons.
“It is extremely important because one of the reasons for the establishment of the State of Israel was because of the Holocaust, the Holocaust that was carried out by Europeans, by white Europeans, not by Arabs or Muslims, and it was in their name that the Palestinians were displaced, ethnically cleansed, and ironically a genocide done against them.”
The Holocaust remains one of humanity’s defining warnings about where dehumanisation and unchecked state violence can lead. But Begg argues that the principle of “Never Again” cannot be reserved for one people.
Accusations of genocide against Israel in relation to Gaza also predate October 2023. In 2014, around 40 Holocaust survivors, alongside more than 200 descendants and other relatives, signed an open letter condemning Israel’s assault on Gaza and accusing it of “ongoing genocide”.
Begg told ONM: “And the genocide accusation is extremely important because it was made firstly by survivors, 300 survivors of the Holocaust, and their family members wrote an open letter to the Israeli government in 2014, 10 years, more than 10 years, 11 years before the Gaza genocide in which they said that Israel is carrying out genocide on the people of Gaza in 2014.”
Begg’s reference to 300 Holocaust survivors is inaccurate. The signatories included approximately 40 survivors alongside hundreds of descendants and relatives.
However, his broader point remains significant: Holocaust survivors themselves were publicly invoking the language of genocide in relation to Gaza nearly a decade before the devastation that began in October 2023.
Three years after October 7, Gaza’s story is therefore not solely about what has been destroyed. It is also about what remains: a father carrying the names of his sons, a child learning to recognise her mother, a journalist picking up a camera knowing colleagues have been killed, and families returning to rubble because rubble is still home.
Palestinian steadfastness should never be romanticised in a way that makes their suffering easier for the world to accept. Palestinians should never have been required to demonstrate such extraordinary endurance simply to remain on their land.
And perhaps the most devastating indictment after three years is not that the world did not know.
Palestinian journalists showed it. Doctors described it. Parents buried their children before cameras. Children were carried from the rubble. The dead were counted. The survivors spoke.
The world knew.
For Begg, the final indictment is against an international community that watched Gaza’s destruction unfold in real time and failed to stop it.
“So it is extremely important on this day to remember the history about what this date has meant and what it has meant for the Palestinians who faced three years of genocide while the world looked on and did nothing.”
