Grievable Lives and Forgotten Children:
Hind Rajab, Anne Frank, and the Politics of Whose Lives Matter
Posted by DAISY CHAPMAN 4 June 2025
In the final hours of her short life, five year old Hind Rajab huddled alone in the back seat of her family car, surrounded by the lifeless bodies of her six family members, her voice trembling through the phone line as she pleaded for help that never came. For over three hours she waited, trapped in terror.
Her story has only recently been told, but echoes across time with chilling familiarity. Like Anne Frank before her, Hind was a child made into a symbol of innocence shattered - not by fate, but through the calculated violence of the regimes intent on erasing them.
In times of war and occupation, the violence that consumes entire generations leaves its most enduring mark on the most vulnerable - children. Children are not only ‘collateral damage’; they are symbolic casualties whose silenced voices speak volumes about the nature of state and structural violence. This article seeks to centre two such voices: Anne Frank and Hind Rajab, two young girls separated by time but bound by the shared fate of being effaced by militarised regimes.
In late January 2024, Hind Rajab’s family were following orders from the Israel Defence Forces to evacuate the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood of Gaza City and head towards a designated ‘safe zone.’ With the family’s car already full, Hind’s mother and siblings escaped on foot. Meanwhile, Hind, her 15-year-old cousin Layan, her aunt, uncle, and three other cousins squeezed into the backseat of their black Kia. Just minutes after they set off, an Israeli military tank approached and opened fire on the vehicle, despite Hind’s uncle Bashar frantically waving a white flag, killing Hind’s aunt, uncle, and cousins. Layan, the only other survivor at the time, managed to call the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, part of the international Red Cross network operating in Palestine. During the call, she said, "they are firing at us; the tank is beside me". Gunfire continued to rain down on the car until Layan’s screams fell silent and the phone line went dead.
|“Please come and get me… I’m afraid of the dark ” - Hind Rajab|
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society dispatcher attempted a follow-up call, and this time, Hind answered her cousin’s phone. Her voice trembling, she pleaded, “Please come and get me… I’m afraid of the dark”. For three hours, dispatcher Rana Faqih stayed on the line with the terrified six-year-old, as an Israeli tank remained stationed nearby. Eventually, clearance was granted for an ambulance to reach the scene. The emergency vehicle, staffed by paramedics Youssef Zeino and Ahmed Al-Madhoon, approached the area where Hind was hiding. Upon arrival, the ambulance was reportedly targeted by an Israeli tank using a laser sight, followed by gunfire and a powerful explosion. For nearly two weeks, Hind’s mother lived in agony, uncertain whether her daughter had survived. On the thirteenth day, rescue workers recovered the bodies of Hind, her six family members, and the two paramedics from the charred remains of both vehicles. Forensic research of the scene carried out since the tragic killing of Hind, her family, and the PRCS paramedics, has analysed and provided compelling evidence about the location of the family car, the close range and rate at which the tank shot the car, and the type of weapon used that can ‘only be attributed to the Israeli forces’ (UN OHCHR, 2024).
Hind Rajab stands as a glaring example of the unrelenting and indiscriminate cruelty of the Israeli Military’s operations in Gaza since October 2023. Since her murder, Hind has become a symbol for the tens of thousands of palestinian children martyred in Gaza. In 2024, student protesters at Columbia University occupied Hamilton Hall, renaming it Hind’s Hall in protest of the brutal slaying of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Similarly, in May 2024, Macklemore released a single entitled ‘Hind’s Hall’, a reference to the Columbia student encampment, in which he expressed his support for the Palestinian people, described the occupation of the Palestinian territories as apartheid, and called for divestment from Israel and an overall immediate ceasefire. All proceeds from the single were donated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the near east.
Two Girls, One Fate: Children as Symbols of State Violence
Hind’s story is not without historical resonance, it echoes the experience of another young girl whose life and death came to symbolise the human toll of war and persecution. A jewish teenager hiding with her family in a secret annex in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, Anne Frank documented her life in a diary that would go on to define the human dimension of the Holocaust for generations, and became one of the most well known books of all time. Her words - poignant, perceptive, and heartbreakingly hopeful - allowed the world to see the war not through the clinical lens of strategy or statistics, but through the eyes of a child. Anne Frank spent two years in hiding before she and her family were discovered and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Anne and her sister were then transferred to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. On April 15th, 1945, Bergen Belsen was liberated by British forces. By the time of the liberation, tens of thousands of prisoners had already died from starvation, disease (especially typhus) and mistreatment. Anne and Margot likely died of typhus in February or March 1945, just weeks before the camp was freed.
Anne Frank’s diary, posthumously published by her father Otto Frank, became one of the most enduring testaments of a child’s experience under the weight of war, persecution, and occupation. Through her words, Anne gave voice not only to her own hopes, fears, and inner life, but also to the millions of Jewish children whose lives were extinguished by the Nazi regime and whose stories were never told. Her diary transformed individual suffering into collective memory, preserving a child's perspective within the historical record of the Holocaust. By contrast, Hind Rajab had no time to write her story - no chance to document her thoughts, dreams, or fears on paper. Instead, the only trace of her final moments comes not in ink, but through a desperate phone call. Huddled alone in a car surrounded by the bodies of her family, Hind’s trembling voice over the line - pleading for rescue. It wasn’t a diary entry, but it was a child’s voice crying out to the world, recorded not in literature but in real time, as violence closed in around her.
|“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness” |
Like Hind, Anne was not a soldier, political actor, or resistance fighter. She was a child whose only act was to exist in the wrong place at the wrong time- defined not by any wrongdoing of her own, but a collective punishment of her people. Though separated by time, geography and religion, both Hind and Anne were innocent young girls caught in the machinery of state violence, children rendered powerless, but whose stories live on and speak with enduring force. Both girls were victims of what human rights observers and scholars call systemic violence, Anne under a regime that engineered systematic genocide, and Hind under a military occupation that has operated with increasing disregard for civilian life and, according to numerous humanitarian organisations, is operating with genocidal intent.
Whose Lives are Grievable?
Judith Butler, renowned gender theorist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, introduced the concept of “grievable lives” in their work Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? This theory provides a crucial framework for examining the unequal ways in which victims of violence are mourned, remembered, or altogether forgotten. Butler contends that not all lives are publicly recognised as losses worthy of grief. Instead, societal, political, and media narratives shape whose suffering is acknowledged and whose is dismissed, whose story is told and whose is ignored. The life, subjugation and death of Anne Frank have been globally commemorated - enshrined in education systems, cultural memory, and international institutions - as emblematic of innocent suffering under genocidal violence. In stark contrast, the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza, an event equally heart-wrenching and situated within a context of prolonged occupation and systemic violence, has received only fragmented and fleeting attention in the year since her death - acknowledged primarily by established pro-Palestinian activists and human rights organisations, while largely overlooked by mainstream western media and institutional bodies. Despite the growing evidence of war crimes and the widespread civilian toll, Hind’s death - like that of thousands of other Palestinian children - has struggled to be universally recognised as grievable. Her story, filtered through politicised media lenses and geopolitical alliances, is at risk of being consigned to silence. Butler’s theory challenges us to confront these hierarchies of mourning and to ask why certain lives are publicly mourned while others are obscured, denied visibility, and effectively erased from the moral landscape of global concern.
It is undeniable that there is also a racial element to the selective empathy given to certain demographics of child victims of war and occupation. Central to this is the idea of the ‘other’ - a figure that exists outside of the bounds of empathy, marked by difference and often stripped of full human recognition. In the global media ecosystem and current geopolitical discourse, Palestinian lives (especially that of Palestinian women and children) have long been relegated to this status of ‘other’: racialised and politicised into abstraction. Children like Hind Rajab are caught within this dehumanising matrix. Their deaths are not universally framed as tragedies as Anne Frank’s was, but as unfortunate collateral within a ‘complicated conflict’. This distancing and selective relegation of empathy signifies a profound moral failure, one where the image of a Middle Eastern child crushed under rubble in Palestine or Syria is met with muted concern, while the image of a child victimised by the war in Ukraine, or killed in a mass shooting in the United States, generates global outrage, immediate solidarity, and are considered lives worth grieving.
Remembering Hind: The Struggle to Memorialise the Life of the Other
The effort to memorialise young lives is not merely an act of remembrance - it is a form of resistance against political erasure. In a world where dominant narratives determine whose deaths are tragic and whose are tolerated, commemorating a Palestinian child killed under military occupation becomes an act of defiance. While Anne Frank’s memory is rightfully preserved in museums, textbooks and cultural history as a symbol of fascist brutality, Hind’s story faces barriers to entering the same register of moral outrage and compassion. To remember Hind is to challenge a media and political discourse that too often strips Palestinian children, and the life of any child considered ‘other’, of their names, faces, stories, and the very recognition of their lives as valuable. It is to insist that the life of the ‘other’ is no less sacred, no less human.
United Nations Human Rights Office. (2024, July 19). Gaza: Killing of Hind Rajab and her family – a war crime too many warn experts. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/gaza-killing-hind-rajab-and-her-family-war-crime-too-many-warn-experts
Forensic Architecture. (2024, June 21). The killing of Hind Rajab. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-hind-rajab
Butler, J. (2009). Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso
Frank, A. (1989). The Diary of a Young Girl. Longman. (Original work published 1947)
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Photo by Selçuk Acar – Anadolu Agency