The photographs circulating online of Yazan Kafarneh, a 10-year-old Palestinian boy on his deathbed in Rafah, southern Gaza, are meant to shock. Taken with his family’s permission, they show the “skeleton” his father said he’d turned into, of a human being seemingly without be-ing. 

One can trace the outline of his skull, with his gaunt and jaundiced skin stretched tight over his forehead, collapsing below his cheekbones, and then taut again, almost on the verge of tearing, around his impossibly sharp jawline. His eye sockets are hollowed out, but it is there, in his irises looking upwards, and in his eyelashes bristling with apparent resistance, that one can feel his life energy, in its final moments, beaming towards us. What message is he trying to send?

It’s not only the tragic end of his life, but its entirety, that should confront our sensibilities about the ongoing horrors with Israel's war on Gaza. Before it began, Yazan’s cerebral palsy was increasingly under control, according to his family. He had access to physical therapy, medicines, and high-nutrient soft foods, including eggs and bananas. All of this allowed him to swim, even if he couldn’t walk. A photo of him prior to the war depicts a cherubic, smiling survivor of a God-given ill.

But he never stood a chance amidst man-made carnage. Once the war broke out, Yazan’s family didn’t have easy access to medications and specific foods. For the eggs, his parents substituted bread, made into a mush with tea; and for the bananas, other sweet foods. They moved Yazan and his three brothers four times in search of safety. They reached the Al-Awda hospital in Rafah on February 25th. Doctors and nurses administered antibiotics for Yazan’s pneumonia, but did not have a reinforced nutrition drink that he’d been having before the war. On March 4th, he died.

The photographs and videos we have of Yazan—cherub to skeleton—are at one level an excruciating insight into the suffering of the most vulnerable people there. At another, they are a visual depiction and timeline of global helplessness, if not intransigence, over the war, and of the futilities and failures to arrest the human catastrophe many saw coming. The UN says that 2.2m of Gaza’s 2.4m residents (over 90 percent) are now on the verge of famine.