Born in War, Buried by It: Naya’s Short Life Under the Shadow of Israel’s Gaza Genocide

In Gaza, grief has no time to settle before it’s torn open again.

Naya was just a year and three months old. A child who had only begun to speak, to laugh, to grasp the world around her, and yet, she had already seen more death than most see in a lifetime.

A year ago, an Israeli airstrike hit her family’s home. The strike tore through the building, opening a massive hole between two floors.

In what can only be described as divine intervention, Naya’s clothes caught on a piece of protruding steel rebar, a “siikh baton”, stopping her from falling into the rubble below. That day, she lost her mother, her sister, her grandmother, and her uncle, all killed in an instant.

She lived on. A motherless orphan. A baby wrapped in sorrow.

For a full year, Naya continued to breathe under the heavy skies of Gaza, surviving a childhood where playtime is often spent in shelters, where lullabies are drowned out by drones, and where parents put their children to bed not knowing if they’ll wake up to see them again.

But last week, just as the world turned its eyes elsewhere, another strike came. Naya was killed along with her aunt Samar and Samar’s husband.

Just like that, another branch of the family tree was burned away.

Naya’s story is not unique in Gaza. There are hundreds of thousands unbearable stories.

Gaza has become a graveyard of childhood after nearly two years of Israeli genocide. Entire generations are being wiped out.

Families, names, stories, erased from the civil registry. About 65,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the Israeli assault, thousands of them children. Entire families are buried together in mass graves. Schools, hospitals, refugee camps, all turned to rubble. Israel’s targeting is systematic. The suffering, deliberate.

This is not war. This is genocide.
Naya was born into the Israeli genocide. She was orphaned by it. And she was killed by it.

She never got to live a day in peace like any child in the world.

N.B.: The story of Naya was shared by her aunt, Abrar Jouda, in a social media post on September 16, 2025.