Introduction A World Against Children by Madeline Lane McKinley.

A few weeks after I began writing this book, Israel declared war on Gaza, following a series of attacks by Hamas and other militants on October 7, 23.

Quote, we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly, pronounced Israel's then minister of defense,

Yoav Galant, ordering a complete siege of the Gaza Strip.

At the time, half of the 2.2 million people living in the open-air prison of Gaza were under the age of 15.

So many of these children, all born under siege,

have since been massacred by the Israeli military,

along with so many of their elders.

That October, much of what we witnessed in this genocide

came as images of suffering children,

a constant stream of photographs of children screaming,

crying, fleeing,

bloodied, injured, dead. One of the most enduring images of the first weeks was captured by photographer Muhammad Salam in a hospital in the southern Gaza Strip, where Inis Abu Mamar

embraced the corpse of her five-year-old niece, Sally, wrapped in a shroud and

balanced on her knee. Days later, another image, taken by photographer Mahmoud Hamz, incited

controversy. It depicted six small children lying in a row, covered in dried blood beneath a white

sheet in the morgue of Al-Akska Hospital in the Gaza Strip.

Yet the image was deemed too graphic to be circulated by mainstream media outlets.

The New York Times decided not to publish the photograph in full, instead using a cropped version to accompany a column.

Of this decision, Times' opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury explained,

quote, as editors we ask a series of questions before publishing sensitive photos, such as,

does the image respect the dignity of the victims? Is it exploitative or gratuitous?

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