A child who died of cold

We know from NOW that one Two-month-old baby has died In Gaza City, in a field hospital, due to the cold and the rainstorm. The newspaper wisely reveals his name, Arkan Firas Musleh, which likely hasn't reached Benjamin Netanyahu or Donald Trump, who are meeting in the United States to discuss that peace agreement, which doesn't directly concern them.

At this very moment, there are surely families—some mothers who have just given birth, like this baby's—in a hospital, watching over their sick children. Some are in incubators, others in operating rooms, or in beds with green sheets, in casts, intubated, or with a fever. What I mean by this is that preserving children's lives is very difficult and not always successful. In these circumstances, a preventable death, so easily preventable, like this one—the death of a baby from hypothermia—is utterly incomprehensible.

The Baby Jesus in the story we reenact in the manger was kept warm by two animals: an ox and a donkey. This one, born in roughly the same area, hasn't been so lucky. We imagine what the parents of this latter child, if they exist, did to keep their son warm. What wouldn't we do, what wouldn't we have done, faced with the possibility of seeing the absolute fragility that is our baby lying still and blue? Cut open our wombs again?

Faced with the many facets of territorial conflicts, political interests, and the "Not everything is black and white" mentality, we must take a stand when there is a dead child. The story of Jesus doesn't end well, as we all know, but it doesn't end prematurely, with the child frozen—although, as the song says, "He's half-dead from the cold." It cannot be allowed that in this world full of wonders we live in (with TikTok, books, music, rockets going to the moon, bottles of oil...) there are people with fewer rights than our pets.