The project memorialises the children killed by Israel’s genocide, and rises to the challenges and limitations of conceptualising the overwhelming death toll statistics.
More than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza by Israel in the last 27 months.
That is more than one child killed each hour, every hour, for over two years. Each child was a universe of their own, with a smile of their own and with dreams of their own. Each with a name of their own, chosen carefully by their loving parents.
In the face of such insurmountable loss, the Each Child a Light memorial quilt invites us to remember, mourn, protest and reflect on the life and light of each child killed during Israel’s ongoing genocidal assault on Gaza.
Panels of the Each Child a Light quilt honouring and memorialising children killed in Gaza.
“There has to be a way to get across the extent of the slaughter and recognise that these are children, not numbers,” Fiona Bailey, the initiator of the Each Child a Light quilting project, told me.
Each square of the patchwork quilt remembers a specific child with their name and the age at which they were killed, carefully embroidered within the design.
There are also unnamed squares for those children whose bodies still remain under the 68 million tons of rubble that covers Gaza, or those who were injured beyond identification by Israeli weapons.
The project has brought together more than 480 participants from across the UK and the world, from a diverse range of backgrounds and ages; all are welcome to take part, regardless of their crafting ability.
“I wanted this to be something that people could be involved in where a community of like-minded people who were equally horrified, desperate and wanting to protest this, could also do something permanent to remember, give testament and bear witness,” Bailey told me in an interview at P21 Gallery in Euston, where the quilt was on display in the Autumn of 2025.
I attended the incredibly moving opening of the quilts exhibition at P21 Gallery, which brought together many of the project’s contributors, including a group of children who were called upon to recite poems written by children their age in Gaza.
One young girl, Sylvia Doust, recited her own poem, which she had written at school, titled I must go down to Palestine. I spoke with Sylvia about what being a part of the project meant to her.
“Palestine is so important to me, loads of children are just lying in the rubble, and they need to be respected.” Sylvia’s first square she made was for a girl named Meira, who was killed by Israel aged just 11, the same age as Sylvia is now. She has also made another square for a little girl named Farah, who was aged just five when she was killed.
“It’s so important to care about them because that life could have been mine; that life could have been anyone’s, but it was that child’s, so I think that we should honour them and make something for them so that they can go down in history, and we can care for them,” Sylvia told me.
More than 500 squares have been made, and many more are still being sewn, yet the quilt has only made a tiny dent in the massive number of children killed; despite this, the project is intended to continue for as long as it takes.
“Even if the killing stops, which it hasn’t, we still need to make sure that those children who did lose their lives are remembered somehow,” Bailey added.
When talking about the loss of life in Gaza, it is vital to point out the limitations of death toll data collection, and to break down what the numbers we see mean and what they refer to.
For example, the database of names used by the Each Child a Light project comes from Al Jazeera’s list of Palestinian children killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza – a list that only accounts for two-thirds of the children killed and takes its data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza (MoH).
The MoH, whose data is accepted as accurate by the United Nations and World Health Organisation, and is referred to in most reporting, records only “direct impact” deaths – meaning deaths directly caused by violence in active warfare, such as by Israeli bombings, bullets, or ground operations.
Furthermore, they also only record deaths that can be physically counted and corroborated, requiring each person’s full name, ID number, age, place of residence, birthday, and gender.
It is vital to understand that the MoH’s count does not include those trapped and killed underneath the rubble of collapsed buildings or those who die “indirect deaths”, and that their data collection has become increasingly difficult since October 2023 due to Israel’s systematic targeted destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system.
These unaccounted-for indirect deaths include, for example, children who are starved to death due to Israel’s blockade on aid, people who are killed by disease due to Israel’s destruction of sanitation infrastructure, or those who are unable to access treatment for illnesses such as cancer due to Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s hospitals.
This places the official MoH death toll statistic of over 70,600 people (at the time of writing) in a position of extreme minimum compared to the true unaccounted scale of death caused by Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.
In a June 2025 report titled Skewering History: The Odious Politics of Counting Gaza’s Dead, written by Australian scholars Richard Hill and Gideon Polya, a total death toll estimate of 680,000 was published.
The figure was concluded using death toll analysis methodology produced by fellow scholars across various conflicts, including those who have been producing vital and respected work for the Lancet medical journal throughout the genocide. The details of the methodology used can be seen in the section of the report titled “Imposed deprivation and Gaza’s death toll”.
This staggering number, referenced in a speech by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, accounts for both direct and indirect impact deaths in Gaza between October 2023 and April 2025.
70,600 is a completely incomprehensible number of people, let alone 680,000, conceptualising that many deaths is an impossible task and, as Palestinian writer Nicki Kattoura wrote in Mondoweiss: “even if we had an accurate number of deaths, we still wouldn’t understand the depth of its meaning. Statistics erase, blur, ambiguate, and rob. I think of how visceral my affective response to the individual stories of martyrs is, that extrapolating it a thousand times over is an impossibility that will inevitably dull those feelings.”
The Each Child a Light quilt, however, through its intricate, thoughtful and intentional memorialising of each individual loss, finds a way to communicate the important pain we feel in response to individual stories but on a mass scale, resisting the dullness that Kattoura fears is inevitable.
Bailey agreed that “it’s just impossible to conceptualise the size of the loss and the amount of people killed. It’s beyond the imagination. But it has to be grasped somehow, and the [Each Child a Light] quilt creates a visual connection with the scale of these atrocities.”
Quilting has historically been used for this exact purpose, to localise and conceptualise mass loss and resist people’s lives becoming mere numbers or statistics.
The largest example of this is the US National AIDS Memorial Quilt, which is dedicated to memorialising the unique lives and stories of those we’ve lost to HIV/AIDS.
This quilt was started in 1985 and has roughly 50,000 panels dedicated to more than 110,000 individuals. It is an ongoing project and a moving testament to the collective determination to remember individual loss and to resist erasure of marginalised communities.
The UK also has its own AIDS memorial quilt, which was exhibited in April last year at the Tate Modern.
There are still so many children to honour and despite the “ceasefire”, death tolls are rising; more children are still being killed by Israel, while others are dying from hypothermia.
These include an eight-month-old baby, Rahaf Abu Jazar, who died in December due to her and her family having to endure extreme cold weather and severe storms whilst living in a tent, because 92% of homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed by Israel.
While the true scale of the loss in Gaza remains ongoing and incompletely measured, the Each Child a Light project begins to create a tangible, visual way for us to understand and conceptualise the true scale of the atrocities in Gaza, one child at a time, in a strikingly beautiful way.
“At some point, you think, ‘Well, how can something so horrific, something so horrendous, be so beautiful?’ And I say ‘Well, it has to be beautiful’,” Bailey told me, “because it has to remember those children as being beautiful and loved, and as having had some joy in their very short lives.”
Details of various squares of the Each Child a Light quilt
The Each Child a Light project is ongoing, and all are invited to join in and make a square. Information about how to get involved and details of future group quilting workshops can be found via their Instagram: @each.child.a.light.
You can also see the quilt on display soon in the foyer of London’s Arcola Theatre, where it will be exhibited from January 21-31, 2026 during the run of their production A Grain of Sand, a one-woman show that takes an intimate look at war through the eyes of a child, blending Palestinian folklore with real-life testimonies from children in contemporary Gaza.
All images by Constance Creswell unless otherwise specified.