This paper focuses on the figure of the Gazan child as a cypher of conflicting humanitarian, ethical, and political inscriptions in what Anna Bernard calls “metropolitan culture”. Given Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip, not to mention the brutality of Operations “Cast Lead”, “Pillar of Defense”, and “Protective Edge”, the child, in his/her traumatized innocence, has emerged as a particularly volatile media image of the region’s crises and catastrophes. Focusing on Selma Dabbagh’s novel Out of It (2011), I start by exploring how this figure has been appropriated in the metropole to domesticate critique of Israeli neo-imperialism in the more universally acknowledged, thus ‘acceptable’, terms of trauma, PTSD, and physical violence. While certainly effective in garnering wider public awareness, such re-presentations potentially obscure the deeper history of colonial violence into which the Gazan child is born, and by which his/her current experience is inevitably mediated. I then turn to a series of recent Gazan literary and cultural texts (Fida Qishta (dir.), Where Should the Birds Fly (2013); Atef Abu Saif (ed.), The Book of Gaza (2014); Refaat Alareer (ed.), Gaza Writes Back (2014)) that, by or about Gazan children, present their voices in their immediacy. I argue that such voices, while highly affective and to a degree tragic, also, in the fluency of their habituated idiom, reflect a local and multilayered historical consciousness that remains untranslatable within the parameters of metropolitan engagement. Thus de-universalizing themselves, these voices and the textual forms through which they circulate inscribe, I conclude, a language of resistance to both Israeli silencing and metropolitan (mis)translation.