Names of over 15,000 Gazan children killed by Israel read aloud in Berlin

BERLIN

The names of over 15,000 Gazan children killed in Israeli attacks over the last eight months were read aloud in Berlin on Saturday, marking International Children's Day.

The event, organized by three Berlin women, took place in front of the Neue Wache, the city's central monument. Hundreds of pairs of children's shoes were placed on the sidewalk of Unter den Linden Street to draw attention to the mass killings in Gaza.

The reading out of the names by numerous volunteers began at 9 a.m. local time and will continue until midnight.

Speaking to Anadolu, Michael Barenboim, a Jewish violinist and professor at the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin, who took part in the reading, said he believes that it is very important to “give back the humanity” taken from these children who were killed in Gaza by reading their names aloud.

“So it’s also important for different people to come here and read the names. In this way, each of the more than 15,000 victims will be honored."

Nadja Vancouwenberghe, one of the event's organizers, explained that the event was prepared by three women from France who have been living in Berlin for a long time.

“We really wanted to express our compassion and our frustration as well,” she said, adding they want to do something from Germany “to show that many people actually in solidarity want to express not just anger, not just political words, but to just share together basic human compassion.”

Pointing to the silence in Germany over Israel's attacks on Gaza, she said: “One of the big motivations we had was to actually break the silence in Germany.”

German media silence

Vancouwenberghe stated that not everything is perfect in France, but at least there is some media diversity.

“Here, it’s absolutely uniformity, incapacity to criticize anything to do with Israel, and this is unbelievable, and it's so important to be visible and audible, because people here either they don't want to know or they don't know. But the media make it easy for people to not know because they're not reporting about what's happening. And this is so outrageous, and we were so shocked by this.”

Vancouwenberghe said that when they informed their German friends, they were very surprised to see that many of them never wanted to take part in a pro-Palestinian political demonstration.

“They said, ‘oh, yeah, it's for the children, maybe, we can.’ This is our message (that) you don't need to be politically whatever. We want to see that in Germany more than anywhere else, people should understand what kind of compassion people should feel when so many people are being killed and the mass killings are so amazing.”

There’s not even any need to discuss whether it's called a genocide or not, she said, explaining: “At the end of the day, 15,000 children died.”

Since last Oct. 7, Israel has pounded the Gaza Strip in retaliation for an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas which killed some 1,200 people.

Over 36,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Israel began its onslaught nearly eight months ago. Most of those killed have been women and children, with more than 82,000 others injured, according to local health authorities.

Israel is also accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, whose latest ruling ordered Tel Aviv to immediately halt its operation in Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians had sought refuge from the war.

* Writing by Seda Sevencan