IDF Kidnapping Gaza Babies: A Stolen Generation in Palestine?
Human rights groups are currently investigating an incident of an Israeli soldier who allegedly kidnapped a baby girl was left alone in her Gaza home. Reports emerged when an Israeli soldier, Shahar Mendelson, went on a phone interview with Israeli radio station GLZ to report the incident.
During the call, Mendelson’s version of the story was that the Israeli soldier Harel Itach heard the baby girl crying alone in her home in Gaza, assuming that her parents were dead, he took her to receive medical care in Israel. Mendelson’s tone hails Itach – now reported dead- to be a philanthropic kind hearted soldier who could not the little girl behind “Despite all the atrocities that he saw in Nahal Oz and Gaza, he put his heart first and did the right thing and that was the kind of man he was” said Mendelson.
The presenter, upon hearing this, thought for a moment he misheard what Mendelson just said and asked him to repeat again.
Al Jazeera has reported a similar testimony from a father in Gaza. Rushi al Zaza said the soldiers broke into his home, handcuffed his wife and took away his two children, four years and six months’ old.
What is noteworthy is that Mendelson said ‘Itach brought the baby girl back to Israel’ implying that the Gazan girl belonged to Israel state in the first place. The two incidents have a great resemblance to the the story of the Stolen Generation of Australia’s indigenous babies when the British government in Australia systematically abducted mixed race children from their families and put them in orphanages as a way of erasing their ethnic origins and fragmenting their history by permanently dislocating them from their families.
The story of the baby Gazan girl-whose identity and whereabouts remain unknown-is one story of displacement and there could be others which remain buried or unreported.
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