Queen Rania’s Remarks at Save the Children Event - NY, USA

Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim.

Thank you, Inger.        

And thank you all at Save the Children, for hosting this event.

A child’s cry is fine-tuned to grab our attention.

It causes a visceral reaction: racing heartbeat, quickening breath, rising blood pressure… We see this in parents, but in other adults as well. A crying child in the room is enough to drive every other thought from our minds.

It is nearly impossible to ignore a single child in pain.  Yet, as we speak, an entire generation of Palestinian children is crying out to the world. And the adults are choosing to look away.

More than immoral, it is unnatural.

And yet…

I will not recount the number of Palestinian children who have been killed, wounded, orphaned, or detained over the past year in Gaza and across the Occupied Palestinian Territories – you all know the figures, which are almost certainly an undercount. 

The easiest way to justify harming a child is to un-child them. Age them up, demonize them, group them together in the tens of thousands, so that they blur together into one faceless mass.

But Mahmoud wasn’t a number. He was a ninth-grader riding his bike home from school, when he was shot and killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank city of Jenin.

Tala, killed in an airstrike in Gaza City, was a little girl in pink roller skates – hit by a piece of shrapnel on her way out to play.

Asser and Aissel, a twin boy and girl, were just four days old when they were killed in their home, alongside their mother and grandmother – the same day their birth certificates were issued.

The early years are meant to be a time of wonder – of exploration, innocence, and play.

Instead, Gazan children too young to know their multiplication tables are being forced into the roles of adults. They care for younger siblings… they wait in line for food rations…they dig through the rubble for anything that can be salvaged.

Some people would prefer not to think about the specifics of Palestinian children’s suffering. They’d rather hide behind the maxim that this conflict is too complicated, and just move on.

But put politics aside. A child is a child… and all children deserve to be protected. There is nothing complicated about that.

Anyone who has ever loved or cared for a child knows how rewarding it can be to get it right… and how devastating it can be to get it wrong.

Right now, we – the adults of the world – are failing the children of Palestine. And we need to do better.

The bloodshed must end. The bombs must stop falling. Aid access must resume, without exception.

Every child cries in the same language. And, deep inside us all, is the urge to go to them, pick them up, and dry their tears.

That instinct is the very best of humanity. And we need to protect them from the very worst.

Thank you very much.