The night before I read Chapter 6 of Edward Said's memoirs Out of Place as I was getting ready for bed. He was describing the tumultuous events of 1947-1948 as Palestine became Israel.

From his previous scholarly works and his passionate and personal involvement in the Palestinian cause, I had anticipated a narration of Zionist atrocities on the Palestinians as they were evicted from their homeland.

However, the book mainly confined itself to what happened to his extended family, middle-class Christian Arabs in Jerusalem who suddenly found themselves homeless and dispossessed. For Edward Said himself who was then only 12 and living a comfortable, protected existence, this was not physically very traumatic.

Though he was born in Jerusalem, his father ran a successful business in Cairo. The family temporarily moved back to Jerusalem in 1947, only to move back to Egypt when Jewish settlers drove them out of their homes.

The only allusion to Zionist atrocities was one described by his aunt of the Deir Yassin event. But she only described how Arab girls were transported naked on the back of trucks, not so much the cold-blooded massacre of innocent civilians.

Lo! What I could not find in his memoirs, I saw it in the next day's newspapers and Internet websites later. Twelve-year-old Mohamed Jamal al Durra was killed as he and his father were returning from a used car market. I did not see the television footage but those still pictures were enough to send me into profound sadness.

That look of white terror in the face of imminent, violent death, a father's instinct to shield his son from danger and those final, frantic pleas to the Israeli soldiers not to shoot. Seconds later Mohamed lay dead on his father's lap as he himself, badly wounded, lapsed into unconsciousness.

In my profession, I take care of dying children on a regular basis. But there is a vast difference between children dying of serious medical illnesses and those innocent ones killed in armed conflicts. Have the images of violent deaths in Hollywood entertainment desensitised us that the world's outrage lasts merely for a day or two and other children continue to be killed and maimed within days of Mohamed's death?

If there is a compelling reason why there should never be wars is that many of its victims are the innocents, children in particular. If they are not killed or maimed, the psychological trauma can be just as harrowing. I remember those sad, desperate faces of children pressed against the windows of coach-buses, waving goodbye to their fathers as they were evacuated out of Sarajevo. Some never to see them again.

July 1995, Sebrenica. Similar images, only that this time the women and children in those buses knew that they would never see their fathers and husbands again.

Screaming in pain

But to me, and perhaps to many others in my generation, the image that has the most profound and lasting impact was Nick Ut's 1972 photograph of a naked Kim Phuc and four other children, with South Vietnamese soldiers in the background fleeing on a highway.

I was happy to see her photograph again in 1995, smiling and cuddling her baby son, and showing her badly scarred back (she settled in Toronto in 1992). But I wished I knew what happened to the other four children in that original photograph.

Another moving photograph from the Vietnam war that I have been searching in vain to show to my children is that of an orphaned boy looking after his baby brother in a little box on a Saigon street. I understand that the baby was later adopted by an American family but I do not know what happened to his brother. Looking back, I must say that those profoundly moving still images had shaped my outlook on life and influenced my choice of vocation.

I have never been that naive to believe that wars and conflicts are just the stuff of history books, but never did I ever imagine that I would one day be weeping over the fate of innocent children who are victims of a political conflict in my own country. I am referring, of course, to the children of the jailed former deputy prime minister.

Back to Mohamed al-Durra. There will be no peace without justice in Palestine. In today's world order, with the overweening arrogance of the pundits of "the clash of civilisations" and "the end of history", and the many Muslim and Third World states led by autocrats and dictators of various shades, the Palestinian people stand very little hope of getting justice. Knowing that it has a protector, the Zionist state can continue in its aggression with impunity as it has in the past in violation of numerous UN resolutions.

Mohamed was certainly not the last innocent child to die in this injustice and aggression, committed ironically by a people who had suffered a similar fate only a generation ago.

DR MAZENI ALWI is a medical practitioner who takes care of sick children.