Death is commonplace for Gaza’s lost generation

Growing up in the Palestinian enclave leaves the young numbed to the violence of their daily lives

Two decades ago the mother of nine-year-old Abdul Rahman Jadallah described to me how she twice lost her child. Once to a worship of death and then to death itself.

Living in southern Gaza, the Palestinian boy had come to accept destruction and killing as normal, and to admire the men attacking Israel and what he saw as the heroic circumstances of their deaths.