(RNS) — A year ago, a 6-year-old girl named Hind Rajab sat in a car surrounded by the bodies of her family members, trapped in the wreckage of an Israeli strike in Gaza. For hours, she pleaded for help over the phone, her tiny voice carrying both the weight of her fear and the innocence of a child who still believed rescue was possible. “Come take me,” she begged. And then — silence.
Days later, her body was found, lifeless in that same car, her rescuers killed before they could reach her.
Hind Rajab is not just another casualty in a war that has already claimed far too many lives. She is the Anne Frank of Gaza, a child whose final moments should haunt the conscience of the world. Just as Anne’s diary bore witness to the horrors of Nazi persecution, Hind’s last phone call is a testament to the atrocities of our time. And like Anne, her story must be told, not just for the sake of memory, but for justice.
For many Palestinians in diaspora like myself, Hind’s story is what could’ve been any of ours. Every Palestinian in the world has seen themself in Gaza somehow. We’ve cried with them in their long episodes of devastation. We’ve smiled with them for the few fragile moments of refuge. We’ve been inspired by them to continue to fight for our collective Palestinian existence, while their literal existence is being removed in monstrous numbers by the day. But they are not numbers, and neither are we. Wadea, the young child stabbed to death in Illinois, was killed here by the same evil that killed Hind there. But to think how many of them have been killed there is paralyzing at times.
The scale of Gaza’s destruction is staggering — tens of thousands killed, thousands of children buried beneath rubble, entire families erased. The images coming out of Gaza show bones, skulls, torn bodies — scenes too horrific to fully comprehend. The numbers, as shocking as they are, risk becoming abstract in the minds of those who are not living this nightmare.
But Hind was not a statistic. She was a 6-year-old girl who loved playing with her cousins, who had favorite toys, who had a future stolen from her. To forget her — to let her name fade into the long list of the dead — is to erase her existence all over again.
Palestinians return to northern Gaza, amid destroyed buildings, after Israel’s decision to allow thousands of them to return for the first time since the early weeks of the 15-month war with Hamas, Jan. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)
This week, Palestinians began returning to northern Gaza, to the ruins of homes that once held their entire lives. Some returned with tears of joy, relieved to simply be back, to reclaim even a fragment of what was stolen. But they are not just returning to shattered walls — they are stepping over the bones of their loved ones, sifting through rubble where they will find pieces of the people they once embraced. The joy of survival is inseparable from the grief of loss. They will rebuild, because resilience is woven into their being, but they will always be shattered in some way.
And yet, even in their pain, they are refusing to be erased. They are proving, with every step over the rubble, that this land is still theirs. That their stories — like Hind’s — will not be forgotten.
Anne Frank did not live to see the end of the Holocaust, but her words survived. And because of that, no one can claim ignorance about what happened to her and millions like her. But Hind Rajab had no diary. Her testimony is in the broken phone call, in the wreckage of her car, in the cries of every Palestinian mother who has had to bury a child.
The world has a choice. It can let her name be buried under the weight of “collateral damage” reports, or it can hold onto it, say it, demand that those responsible answer for it.
This genocide — the most documented in history — has already produced more images of suffering than the world has ever seen. But it is not enough to see. It is not enough to know. We must remember. We must say Hind’s name.
Because history will ask where we stood when Hind Rajab called for help. And silence will not be an excuse.