“Please, don’t put him in the fridge!” she said. “He can’t bear the cold.”

Her voice cracked as she pleaded with medics not to place her 2-year-old son Omar in the morgue. She had tried for nine years to have a child. Then, in the instant it takes an airstrike to crash into a building in Khan Younis, in the Gaza Strip, he was gone.

We often hear that the genocide in Gaza that began in October 2023 has taken the lives of so many innocent people. And though men in Gaza are also entitled to a presumption of innocence, the killings of women — over 20,000 Palestinian women and 15,000 children have been killed — have demonstrated to the world how Israel is targeting not just Palestinians, but also their future.

On May 15, Palestinians mark Nakba Day, a commemoration of their collective dispossession, expulsion, and displacement at the hands of the Zionist project and the state of Israel. Today, more than ever, it is obvious how this catastrophe is not just an event of the past in 1948, around the time of Israel’s declaration of independence, but rather an ongoing effort to destroy the Palestinian people.

This war, after all, is not just about death. It is about making life impossible.

Palestinians are now forced to live, give birth, and bury their children in the same space.

This is especially visible in not just the attacks on children, but also on women’s access to reproductive care. Maternity wards have been shut down, neonatal care all but wiped out, and literally embryos at a fertility clinic destroyed by the thousands. UNICEF reports a 300 percent increase in miscarriages. Eight infants died of hypothermia in January of this year.

To destroy reproductive capacity is to erase the future of a people.

Palestinians are now forced to live, give birth, and bury their children in the same space.

The all-out assault on children puts parents in a constant panic. “It’s like an apocalypse,” one father said. “You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat. There is no clean water, no toilets, and the bombing never stops. You feel subhuman here.”

That is the point.

Genocide is not just about bodies. It is about condition. The attack on the Palestinian future is part and parcel of Israel’s assault. It is part of the ongoing Nakba. Don’t believe me? Just look at what Israel’s Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter said as the war was........

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