Ms. Rachel opens up about her support for Gaza’s children: ‘I couldn’t look away’

Ms. Rachel opens up about her support for Gaza’s children: ‘I couldn’t look away’
Ms. Rachel started her YouTube channel in 2019 after making videos to help her speech-delayed son. She now has a show on Netflix. (Getty)
Children’s YouTube star Ms. Rachel was browsing Instagram when a follower shared with her a video from Gaza that broke her. It showed a young boy, likely no older than five, suffering from severe shock after a bombing. His eyes are wide with fear and he is shaking furiously.
“The look in his eyes has stayed in my mind since I saw the video,” Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Accurso, tells The Independent.
“A kind doctor hugged him and told him the bombing was over and he finally broke down into tears. No child should experience that kind of fear, shock and terror.”
That video was one of many that compelled Ms. Rachel to speak out on a conflict that has fiercely divided opinion in the US. Over the coming months, she would become one of the most prominent public advocates for children caught up in the war — but it also brought a backlash.
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A former child educator from Maine, Ms. Rachel has built an audience of more than 13 million subscribers on YouTube with her mix of educational videos and songs for young children. Parents worship her as a deity for the respite she gives them; her bright, high-pitched intonation is the background music to households across the country.
Ms Rachel felt compelled to publicly advocate for the children of Gaza (Netflix)
With billions of views on her channel, and millions more across Instagram and TikTok, she now sits atop a booming empire with her own line of toys and books, and on Monday her show debuted on Netflix. The New York Times called her “this era’s Mister Rogers.”
In May last year, some seven months into Israel’s war against Hamas, children were bearing the brunt of relentless bombing. The United Nations estimated that some 14,500 children had been killed by intensive Israeli strikes across the Gaza Strip, with many more buried underneath the rubble. At least 1,000 children had one or both legs amputated due to injuries, more than 13,000 children were suffering from malnutrition, and around 17,000 children had been orphaned.
Images of those atrocities were filtering through on social media, and to Ms. Rachel’s feed.
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“I couldn’t look away from the scale and gravity of suffering I was seeing every day,” Ms. Rachel says.
“I know how crucial the first few years are for brain development and the lifelong effects trauma and malnutrition have on the brain. It’s a failure of humanity to deny children food, water, medical care, shelter and education, and to not protect children from violence,” she adds.
Many careers have been ruined and many public figures ostracised for wading into the Gaza conflict, but Ms. Rachel says she felt a responsibility to use her fame for good.
“I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t use that platform to speak out for every child, everywhere,” she says.
She first posted about the conflict in May last year to her 2 million Instagram followers, announcing that she would be raising money on Cameo, the personalized video messaging app, for Save the Children’s emergency fund for children in Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan. Within hours she had raised $50,000 with orders for 500 videos that she would personally record.
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A couple of days later she followed up with a written message, declaring that “Children should never experience the horrors of war – nor be killed, injured or taken hostage.”
The messages appeared designed to be as universal as possible, non-political while being targeted enough to help in a practical way.
The vast majority of the comments were positive, but her posts brought a backlash nonetheless.
“You should be for all children not just the children in gaza. Do you not care what hamas did to all the innocent jewish children october 7th???” one Instagram comment among dozens of others said.
“What about the hostages?!!!! do they matter” another wrote, before the comments were eventually turned off.
Those messages had a noticeable impact on the usually cheerful children’s educator. Days later, Ms. Rachel posted a video of herself in near darkness, and in tears.
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“The bullying is so bad. It’s so bad. But I can handle this,” she said . “That is who I am. I love my neighbor. I love every child,” she added. “Imagining for one second what a mom is going through unable to feed her child or give her child clean water or keep her child safe.”
“I care deeply for all children. Palestinian children, Israeli children, children in the US — Muslim, Jewish, Christian children — all children, in every country,” she wrote in the caption for the video.
Despite her clear distress, Ms. Rachel didn’t stop.
“I have no regrets. I’m guided by what’s in my heart and my unshakable belief that we owe our children more,” she says.
Children stand amidst the rubble of a building hit by an Israeli air strike in Deir al-Balah in the centre of the Gaza Strip, on May 13, 2023 (AFP via Getty Images)
She posted a prayer song for children in Gaza and Israel, asking “leaders and presidents” to “please stop hurting them.”
In another, she described two babies in Gaza who were severely malnourished.
“Their thighs are like this small,” she said, making a tiny circle with her fingers, and holding back tears.
“We can’t let children starve, that is not who we are.”
Ms. Rachel has also posted numerous times calling for the return of Israeli children held hostage in Gaza, including two-year-old Kfir Bibas and his four-year-old brother Ariel.
The conflict in Gaza was triggered by an attack inside Israel by Hamas on 7 October, 2023, during which around 1,200 Israelis were killed, and another 251 people were taken hostage. Israel’s retaliatory war from land and air, alongside a blockade, has killed 45,000 Palestinians, the majority of whom women and children, according to health authorities inside the besieged territory. Around 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced from their homes.
A tentative ceasefire agreement is now in place, but the situation is still devastating for children. The UN now believes that more than 13,000 children have been killed , an estimated 25,000 injured, and at least 25,000 hospitalized for malnutrition.
“A generation has been traumatized,” Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told the UN Security Council last week.
“Children have been killed, starved and frozen to death. Some died before their first breath — perishing with their mothers in childbirth,” he added.
And Ms. Rachel says that even as things hopefully get calmer with the ceasefire, she feels compelled to continue speaking out to protect children impacted by the war. “It’s right,” she says. “It’s human.”
Now she occasionally receives brighter videos from Gaza, too. Earlier this month she shared a video of four young children gathered around an iPad in a tent. They sat in silence as Ms. Rachel sang and danced on screen. A young girl’s smile beamed across her face.
“It’s so sweet,” Ms. Rachel says of the video. “I’m so grateful if I can help bring them even a little joy in the midst of such immeasurable suffering. I want them to know that I love and cherish them, and so many others do too.”