By Vera Baboun
Ambassador of Palestine to Chile
Dr. Alaa al-Najjar is not just another name in Gaza’s devastated registers—she is Gaza’s soul, torn apart. A pediatrician, a mother of ten, and a lifeline for countless children wounded by the unrelenting violence in the Strip, Dr. Najjar lived to save lives. On Friday, she left her children at home to serve in the emergency room of Nasser Medical Complex. Hours later, she was forced to identify seven of her own children’s lifeless, burned bodies in the same hospital’s morgue.
Yahya, 12, Eve, 9, Rival, 5, Sadeen, 3, Rakan, 10, Ruslan, 7, Jibran, 8, Luqman, 2, and Sedar, not yet 1 year old were killed when an Israeli airstrike struck her home in Khan Younis. Two remained buried beneath the rubble. Only 11-year-old Adam survived. Her husband, Dr. Hamdi al-Najjar, lies critically wounded. In one strike, a family was turned to ash, and a healer’s heart permanently shattered.
This is not a chapter from a dark history. This is today. This is Gaza. And this is the unbearable cost of unchecked, dehumanizing military aggression. These children weren’t faceless numbers. They had names. Toys. Dreams. They drew on walls and ran barefoot in their home. They were not collateral—they were beloved. They were human.
There is no moral calculus that can justify this. No brutal military aggression doctrine or self-defense rationale that makes this massacre acceptable. This is not about security. This is about the systematic erasure of families, of futures, of an entire people’s right to exist.
Dr. Najjar is not just a mother in mourning—she is the embodiment of Gaza’s broken heart. Her story is not isolated; it is repeated across Gaza, again and again. But her loss, the depth of its cruelty, must serve as the moment when the world says: no more.
What will it take? How many more families must vanish from the registry of the living before conscience overcomes calculation? How many more doctors must bury their own children with the same hands they once used to save others?
There is no future in rubble. No defense in starvation. No justice in the mass burial of toddlers. What is happening is not retaliation—it is annihilation. Not strategy—but devastation.
We must say her name: Dr. Alaa al-Najjar. And the names of her children. We must let their memory rupture the silence, puncture the excuses, and break the political paralysis that has allowed this horror to unfold.
We appeal—not as diplomats, but as fellow human beings—to every government, every institution, every citizen of this shared world: this must end. Not tomorrow. Now.
Let Adam, the lone surviving child of ten, be a reminder of what remains—and what we still have the power to save.
Gaza does not need more statements of concern. It needs ceasefire. It needs protection. It needs the world to choose humanity.
Let this be the last massacre. Let this be the final wake-up call.
End this brutal military aggression. For Alaa. For Adam. For every mother who still holds her child—and every one who no longer can.