Amid political arguments over Gaza, individual lives can disappear from view. Compassion should not depend on nationality, religion or allegiance, nor should suffering have to earn our recognition or empathy.

The noise surrounding Gaza has become a relentless machine of distraction. We’re fed a constant to-ing and fro-ing of political debates, arguments over immigration, borders and the rhetoric of governments. On our screens, headlines clash with one another, creating a war of opinions that can smother the actual human reality.

There’s something deeply uncomfortable about the way we’ve learned to live with Gaza and perhaps even more uncomfortable about the way we’ve learned to talk about it. Somewhere between the images and statistics, the people themselves disappear.

We hear about children being killed, families displaced, homes destroyed and people reduced to finding food, water and somewhere safe to sleep.

Suffering begins to feel ordinary, almost inevitable, as though this is simply what happens there to those people and therefore sits outside the boundaries of the life we’re living here.

Imagine, for a moment, a child you love. You already have a face in your mind, a particular voice, a way of laughing, perhaps a favourite food or small habit that makes you smile. You wouldn’t think of that child as a statistic, but as one irreplaceable little person whose absence would tear something permanent from your life.

Now place that child in Gaza, not as an exercise in politics but simply as a child, and ask whether the distance between your life and theirs should be enough to make their suffering feel less immediate.

We say every human life has equal value, yet our responses to suffering can reveal otherwise – in the language we use, the images we look at and whose grief we instinctively understand.

The UN and UNICEF continue to document children killed and injured, displacement, damage to essential infrastructure and profound humanitarian needs in Gaza. In the West Bank, Palestinian families face killings, settler violence, displacement, demolitions and restrictions that shape daily life.

Every one of those numbers represented somebody’s child, mother, father or friend, whose absence left an empty space in another person’s heart.

Beneath the politics, history and arguments about responsibility remains something basic: a child should be able to grow up without learning that death can arrive from the sky, that the place they call home can disappear, or that the adults who are supposed to keep them safe may themselves be unable to do so.

When we talk about Gaza, we often seem compelled to establish our position before we are allowed to express our grief. We explain where we stand on the history, Hamas, the Israeli government or the international community.

A Palestinian child doesn’t need to be politically innocent before we’re permitted to care about them.

We have created a world in which identity so often arrives before humanity. ‘Palestinian’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘immigrant’ can trigger arguments about politics, religion, borders and legality before we see the person in front of us.

Have we become better at categorising suffering than at feeling it?

The danger is that we begin to believe empathy has to be earned; that before we mourn a grieving Palestinian or Israeli family, we must first know what they believe politically or religiously.

A mother doesn’t need to have the correct opinion before her dead child becomes worth mourning.

Children haven’t chosen the government, armed group, religion, border, history or ideology surrounding them. They arrived with the same vulnerability, need for affection and safety, and capacity for curiosity and joy.

When that expectation of safety is broken, more than a life is damaged; a childhood is damaged, with consequences for memory, fear, relationships, education and the way the next generation understands the world.

We don’t need a PhD in Middle Eastern history to know that a frightened child is frightened. We don’t need to settle every argument about the past before we can recognise suffering in the present.

We can condemn violence against Israeli civilians and grieve Palestinian children. We can recognise Jewish trauma and Palestinian suffering. We can oppose antisemitism and Islamophobia with the same determination.

There’s no contradiction unless we have allowed ourselves to believe that compassion is a limited resource.

It isn’t.

There will always be reasons to look away; another crisis, another argument, another explanation for why this particular suffering is too ‘complicated’ to understand.

I would rather sit with the discomfort of caring about people I don’t know, in a place I have never lived, without requiring them to prove that they deserve my empathy.

If the value of a life changes according to where someone was born, what colour their skin is, what religion their parents follow or how sympathetic we find their political circumstances, then equality has become little more than a word we use when it’s convenient.

The children of Gaza shouldn’t have to become symbols before we care about them and the children of the West Bank shouldn’t have to become statistics before we notice them.

They need what children everywhere need: safety, family, education, food, medicine, love, somewhere to sleep, the freedom to play and the ordinary privilege of believing there will still be a tomorrow worth imagining.

That’s not a political position.

It’s the starting point of humanity.

Somewhere in that small moment of decision lies something much larger than Gaza. It’s the difference between a world in which humanity is divided into those whose suffering we recognise and those whose suffering we explain away and a world in which a child’s life remains precious simply because it’s a child’s life.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.