Gaza war’s child victims to be remembered

The names of around 20,000 children believed to have been killed during the war in Gaza are to be read out at co-ordinated events across Preston this afternoon.

The identities and ages of the youngest victims of the conflict will be concurrently proclaimed on Sunday (26th October) at 20 different locations across the city between 4pm and 5pm.

More than 200 people have volunteered to read the names, mirroring similar ceremonies taking place nationwide.

In other parts of the country, the list of the dead will be delivered over a 13-hour period. However, in Preston, 1,000 names will be announced simultaneously at each location – which includes mosques, churches and some outdoor venues – within the space of an hour.

Local campaign group Children of the Ghetto, which has arranged the event, says the aim was to involve as many organisations as possible – and bring together people from a variety of backgrounds, including Christians, Muslims, trade unionists and political campaigners.

One of the co-ordinators, independent Lancashire county councillor Michael Lavalette said: “Close to 20,000 children are known to have been killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza – hundreds of them within the first few weeks and months of life.

“We want to read out their names and acknowledge that these children were the victims of a genocide and that they should be held in our memory as the silent victims of a horrendous crime.”

The conflict began after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7th October 2023, in which around 1,200 Israelis were killed and almost 250 taken hostage, many of whom also later died.

More than 67,000 Palestinians had been killed in Israel’s military response by the time a second ceasefire came into force earlier this month, according to figures compiled by the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry.

Israel insists that it has not targeted civilians and has acted in self defence – wth its aim being to kill Hamas operatives and destroy the organisation itself, which is a proscribed terror group in the UK.

Figures from a leaked Israeli intelligence database published earlier this year showed that, as of May 2025, Israel believed it had killed 8,900 fighters from both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. At that point, a total of 53,000 Gazans had died.

A United Nations commission of inquiry concluded last month that Israel had committed four out of the five acts defined as genocide in the 1948 Genocide Convention – an allegation that Israel branded “baseless”.

At the time, an Israeli military official said: “No other country has operated in these conditions and done so much to prevent harm to civilians on the battlefield.”