Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Pupils strike for children killed in Gaza
SCORES of children missed school in Bristol yesterday to protest against Israel’s bombing of Gaza following the Hamas terror assault on October 7.
One parent explained why she supported her children missing school.
Roza Din is among the parents supporting her children’s absence from school.
The 41-year-old said that her two boys, who are eight and 11 years old, are aware of what is happening in Gaza and “feel disappointed in their school” for the difference in the way it has approached this conflict in comparison to that in Ukraine, when they remembered school fundraisers being organised.
Roza described her 11-year-old son as a particularly well-informed child who reads the children’s current affairs magazine The Week.
Roza said: “They are disappointed with their school and the eldest, he doesn’t get it, he doesn’t get why the people who are supposed to protect us and look after us are allowing children who look like him, who believe in the same things as him, to be bombed.
“For my children it is a really big deal because they saw their school’s response to Ukraine and they have also seen their school’s response and the wider world’s response to Palestine.
“My son was really upset that Suella Braverman called his march that he went to last week in London ‘a hate march.’ My parents are from Pakistan but we have family friends who are Palestinian and we also have Jewish friends in Bristol who are against it.”
Roza is one of the many parents who took her children out of school for the strike. She sent her children’s headteacher a template letter distributed by organisers, which outlines the reasons for the children’s absence.
More than 9,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7, when terror group Hamas launched rockets, killed 1,400 Israeli citizens and took around 200 hostages to Gaza.