I didn’t expect my 3-year-old son, Rafik, to find comfort in a YouTube screen while we were surviving a war. But during the long, hunger-filled days of displacement in Gaza, with bombs overhead and no clean water in our mouths, he would whisper her name like a lifeline: “Ms. Rachel.”
Her videos once filled our home with colors, words and songs. When everything else collapsed, he clung to that memory. Even as everything around us fell apart, amid loss and terror. Something about that voice, calm and joyful, made him feel safe when nothing else did.
Outside, warplanes roared and homes collapsed. Inside, my child was asking for the voice that taught him his first English words.
Rafik was barely speaking before the war. But amid the screams and sirens, I had downloaded a few of her videos on my phone, hoping for even a minute of distraction for my kid. We had no WiFi, but in the corner of our bombed-out shelter, her voice gave him a tiny flicker of joy.
I, too, was clinging to anything that could keep him tethered to life, joy and the version of childhood he was being robbed of. As fathers, we’re supposed to protect and provide. But in Gaza, we hold our children as the bombs fall and whisper promises we may not be able to keep.
“Can you say ball?” she’d ask. He repeated it, giggling. “You can do it!” she always said. My son believed her, and so did I. That belief carried us through more than just a night of shelling. Outside, warplanes roared and homes collapsed. Inside, my child was asking for the voice that taught him his first English words.
Other fathers I know told me the same: The weight of failure, though not of our making, settles in our chests. One friend said he used to dream of teaching his son to ride a bike. Now he just prays the boy wakes up each morning. Another father confessed that every time his daughter asks if she can go home, he has to lie, because her home was turned to ash.
Months later, long after we escaped Gaza, but not the grief it carved into us, I saw a video of Ms. Rachel, real name Rachel Accurso. She wasn’t singing or teaching letters this time. She was looking directly into the camera, asking the world to look at the children of Gaza. “Please look at her eyes for one minute,” she said, pointing to a picture of Siwar Ashour, a then-5-month-old severely malnourished baby whose picture came to represent the dire need for an immediate delivery of aid into Gaza.
When I saw that video, I thought of all the parents in Gaza trying to explain to their children why food has run out, or why their sister is gone, or even why the sky is always on fire.
I also saw pictures and videos of Accurso meeting 3-year-old Rahaf. Watching the little girl’s face exude joy as she sang along with Accurso almost made it hard to remember that this innocent child lost both her legs in an Israeli bombardment before she was evacuated along with her mother to the U.S. to receive treatment.
I reached out to Ms. Rachel to ask what moved her to speak up, and what it has meant for her. “I see my children and every child in the children of Gaza,” she told me. “The silence surrounding their unimaginable suffering is unconscionable.”
She also shared how as an early childhood educator she knows how crucial the first few years are for brain development and the lifelong effects trauma and malnutrition have on a child. “It’s a failure of humanity to deny children food, water, medical care, shelter and education — the basic needs of childhood and their human rights.”
Gaza has become one of the deadliest places in the world for children. Since October 2023, more than 50,000 children have reportedly been killed or injured by Israeli airstrikes and shelling, according to statements released by UNICEF in May.
Newborns are dying for lack of formula, toddlers drink sewage water, and children fall asleep crying from hunger.
For Accurso, the images of malnourished babies emerging from Gaza can’t be separated from the work she has devoted her life to. “As an educator, you care about every child in your class. I’ve taught children from so many places and so many backgrounds. They all want to play, to learn, to laugh and to belong. They are all innocent and precious. And geography does not change that.”
“It’s sad that people try to make it controversial to stand up for children who are facing unimaginable suffering,” she continued, echoing a point she’s expressed in previous interviews. “What should be controversial is people staying silent.” To hear someone on the outside say, “These children matter,” is to feel, briefly, that we haven’t failed them entirely, that maybe the world can still listen. For parents like me, who have lived this war with our children, fled bombings, rationed food and buried friends and relatives, her voice has felt like a crack of light breaking through an otherwise impenetrable silence. So many of us carry the guilt of not being able to do enough, even when we know there’s nothing more we could’ve done. To hear someone on the outside say, “These children matter,” is to feel, briefly, that we haven’t failed them entirely, that maybe the world can still listen. Ms. Rachel is reminding the world that advocacy doesn’t have to be loud or political to be powerful. Sometimes it’s a lullaby, a tear, or a mother whispering comfort while holding her baby. In a media ecosystem where saying “Palestine” can cost you followers, sponsors and jobs, Ms. Rachel made a different choice. She spoke with certainty and courage. To say that children deserve food, water, and safety shouldn’t be a brave act. Standing up for those who suffer shouldn’t be condemned. Speaking out against the systems that cause that suffering shouldn’t be dangerous. But it is. We live in a world where a father’s plea to save his starving daughter can be labeled as “confusing politics.” The emotional labor of fatherhood, and parenthood, in Gaza is brutal. We’re asked to absorb our children’s fear, hide our own, and somehow carry on. Accurso’s refusal to look away breaks through that cruel normalization. The people inflicting our pain are labeled “defenders,” while our grief, our screams and even our survival stories are erased, ignored, or repainted in the language of hate. Sometimes I wonder if the world has already decided who is worthy of mourning and who is not. These days, my son watches Ms. Rachel on a screen far from Gaza. The same bright songs and soft encouragements that once helped drown out the sounds of war now fill our quieter mornings with something unfamiliar: calm. He claps, sings and smiles, and I watch him, still half-expecting the ground to shake. There’s a new kind of meaning in the colors and tunes now. For him, they’re play and comfort. For me, they’re a reminder of everything we carried out with us and everyone who couldn’t leave. It’s how we know we haven’t fully survived, I think, as we hold on to fragments of safety layered with memory.
Mohammed R. Mhawish
Mohammed R. Mhawish is a Palestinian award-winning journalist and writer from Gaza City. 
