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Guy Pearce, Annie Lennox and Vanessa Redgrave are among the celebrities calling for an end to the “normalised horror” of children being killed in Gaza, as part of new short film.
Released by Save the Children and Choose Love, it features the stars reciting the words to a poem by Michael Rosen. Titled Don’t Mention the Children, the poem was written in 2014 in response to a Guardian article about the Israeli government banning a radio advert naming children killed in Gaza. It begins:
Don’t mention the children.
Don’t name the dead children.
The people must not know the names
of the dead children.
“The first time I read Michael Rosen’s poem, not only was I profoundly moved, I was also in shock,” Pearce told the Guardian.
“Rosen’s brutal commands stare directly into our soul and force us to confront the cruelty of erasing a child, erasing their name, their memory and their life.”
Others featured include the actors Ambika Mod, Joely Richardson, Juliet Stevenson, Denise Gough, Khalid Abdalla, Zawe Ashton and Indira Varma; as well as the presenters Laura Whitmore and Nadia Sawalha, the model Poppy Delevingne, the emergency doctor Dr Mo Mustafa, the activist Stephen Kapos, and the poem’s creator, Michael Rosen.
The project is paired with renewed calls by Save the Children and Choose Love for the UK government to “end its complicity in the horrors unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank”.
They are urging the public to sign a petition demanding “the immediate suspension of all arms transfers to Israel; all perpetrators to be held to account and an end to Israel’s impunity; and decisive action to be taken to bring Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory to an end”.
“We have all seen the devastating images of children in Gaza, but with time comes a dangerous desensitisation – people look away, or the suffering is ignored, let alone justified by the perpetrators or those complicit,” Pearce said. “The simplicity of this poem doesn’t allow that escape.”
He added: “Taking part in this recital was, for me, a matter of conscience. Every day in Gaza, children are being killed, maimed or starved – trapped in a nightmare they did nothing to create. We cannot allow this horror to be normalised. I urge everyone to speak out and to act. Silence is complicity.”
At least 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, according to the health authorities in Gaza, though independent surveys suggest the figure is far higher. The photographer and Oscar-nominated director Misan Harriman, who spearheaded the film project, said children in Gaza had “endured a relentless stream of atrocities” for nearly two years.
“Their homes, schools and hospitals destroyed, the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon. And still, the world does nothing to stop it,” he said.
Save the Children has been working in Gaza for decades, running primary healthcare centres and providing essential services including screening and treatment for malnutrition. But the aid organisation said it had been unable to get any of its own aid into Gaza since 2 March.
Rosen said: “I wrote Don’t Mention the Children 11 years ago in response to an attempt to silence the names of children killed in Gaza. It is heartbreaking that the poem is still so relevant today – in fact, the situation for children has only grown worse.
“Behind every number, every statistic, is a child with a name and a future that has been stolen. We cannot allow them to be erased. To deny their names is to deny their humanity, and we must resist that erasure at every turn.”
