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The founder of Save the Children, Eglantyne Jebb, wrote that `All wars, whether just or unjust, disastrous or victorious, are waged against the child.’ I’ve been thinking about these words over the last 4 weeks while watching the horrific images of the Israel - Gaza war. So many children have been killed or injured, and the ones who survive will suffer some trauma, probably for the rest of their lives. Wherever they live, most children accept the conditions they’re born into, because unlike adults, they can’t walk away from their immediate environments. They have little agency to make their lives better and those who only know the atmosphere of war and hostility, well, if may seem impossible for them to feel they have a future in the cruel contours of violence and suffering. And yet, whether its searching for a doll in the middle of the grey rubble, or holding onto the torn photo of a missing parent, I think that most children naturally cling onto hope for their emotional survival. They don’t have anything else. During the period she hid from the Nazis, the young and resourceful Anne Frank writes in her legendary diary, of her refusal to become part of the suffering; whatever the misery, she wanted to think about the beauty which still remains in life. In war, we can’t save every child because weapons don’t discriminate between civilian and combatant, adults and children, but it seems to me that for too long we haven’t done enough to protect young people caught up in the vicious conflicts started by adults. In the desire to destroy the enemy, so often what we end up destroying is children’s lives and our own futures. There’s a saying in Islam that our children have rights over us, not just to be fed and clothed but to be protected from harm. This is a moral commitment we should all be prepared to make but while its impossible to protect children from all of life’s harms, when it comes to war, there’s something uniquely perverse in seeing so many of them become collateral damage. As the Autumn light gradually disappears into winter darkness, every now and again, I still see a few children playing in their gardens after school. They look happy and carefree as children should. But I’m reminded of the words of the Palestinian poet Khaled Juma whose poem recalls `the rascal children of Gaza.’ He speaks of getting annoyed at them for being noisy, breaking and stealing things from his balcony while alive, but now he laments, ` come back and scream as you want and break all the vases, steal all the flowers, come back, just come back.’