In a modest household in Gujranwala, where school gadgets sit beside stacks of handwritten petitions — not with ink, but penned in own blood, two children have spent more than two years doing something most adults find too heavy to sustain: refusing to look away. As the world marked International Day of Peace on September 21 — observed this year under the United Nations theme “Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day” — Ghulam Bishar Hafi (13), and his younger sister Ubaydah Al Fiddhah Hafiah (11), are renewing a pledge that has, by now, outlasted more than one ceasefire and more than one news cycle: that they would keep speaking for the children too small, too frightened, or too far away to speak for themselves.
Their campaign, “Voice for the Voiceless,” did not begin with a press conference or a carefully worded statement. It began with grief that had nowhere else to go. On the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression, the siblings — guided by their father and mentor, Prof. Dr. Aurangzeb Hafi, a senior research methodologist whose own career has been shaped by humanitarian and academic work across Asia and Oceania — drafted the first protest note for them — not to be written in ink, but in their own blood. It was a gesture almost too stark for the vocabulary usually reserved for childhood, and it marked the beginning of a discipline the two children have maintained ever since. A single note grew into a sustained campaign: an online petition titled “Stop Infanticide in Gaza,” launched on International Human Solidarity Day, and a series of open letters — several again written in blood — addressed to world leaders, including Netanyahu, and to United Nations bodies entrusted with protecting children in conflict.
The language in these letters has never softened with time, even as the siblings themselves have grown two years older with each fresh appeal. In their most recent resolution, issued to mark UN World Humanitarian Day, they described the children of Gaza as living through what they called a “can’t-live-can’t-leave tragedy” — trapped behind a siege that had by then stretched past twenty months, cut off from food, medicine, and the most basic guarantees of safety. They wrote of children being “farmed like animals,” treated, in their words, worse than the standards the world extends to kittens or puppies. It is an accusation too severe for most adult commentators to risk in public discourse — and it is precisely that unfiltered rawness that has made two children from Pakistan impossible for the world’s diplomats to dismiss as merely sentimental.
The world, in fact, listened. The Palestinian Ambassador to Pakistan, Dr. Zuhair Zaid, hosted the siblings at a special reception at the embassy, where he made a declaration rarely extended to strangers, let alone children from another country: that Palestine now considered Ghulam Bishar and Ubaydah its own, and that the petitions, resolutions and protest notes they had issued on its behalf belonged to the Palestinian people as living testimony. The invitation followed a documentary screening in Karachi that had introduced their blood-written notes to a wider domestic audience, cementing their reputation as, in the ambassador’s words, the youngest activists ever to take a frontline advocacy role for Gaza’s children. In a moment the family has since described as among the most moving of the entire campaign, Dr. Zaid — accompanied at the reception by his own young daughter — told the siblings he would now count them among his own five children.
Recognition followed from other institutions too. On World Children’s Day, the siblings were honoured with the ‘Grace de Monaco’ International Medal and the ‘Eglantyne Jebb Platinum Pen for Peace’ — awards carrying the names of two of history’s most consequential champions of child welfare — along with a two-year fully funded study scholarship worth $10,000, giving them the choice to pursue an education anywhere in the world. Yet in a decision that surprised even their most ardent supporters, the siblings chose to dedicate both medals outright to the children of Gaza, insisting that no recognition of their own effort should be allowed to eclipse the suffering that had inspired it in the first place. Around the same period, their father’s own humanitarian credentials deepened further: Prof. Hafi became co-recipient of the ‘Bidecadal Merit Award’ alongside Pakistan’s most revered philanthropist, Bilquis Edhi, who is said to have declared him her third son, alongside her own two biological sons.
Crucially, the siblings’ concern has never confined itself to a single border. Their letters and petitions have widened over time to speak for children in Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, Congo, Mozambique, Myanmar and Syria — a deliberate widening, their father has said, born of the conviction that a child’s suffering carries no passport and demands no particular geography to matter. When a UN-organised exhibition titled “Gaza, Palestine — A Crisis of Humanity, A Cry for Justice” was due to be dismantled, the siblings pushed to have it extended into a virtual format, ensuring its photographs and testimonies would continue to reach audiences long after the physical walls came down — a small but telling example of how two children have learned to translate grief into strategy.
Their persistence has now drawn further honour. Impact Hallmarks, the international merit-indexing body, has named Ghulam Bishar and Ubaydah among its ‘Young Trailblazer Impactpreneurs’, formally recording their campaign in its final verdict as a rare instance of sustained, youth-led humanitarian conscience — a recognition that places two schoolchildren from Gujranwala alongside far older names in the field of global advocacy like Greta Thunberg of Sweden and Orion Jean from the US.
What distinguishes the Hafi siblings’ campaign, ultimately, is not any single letter or medal, but its refusal to end. Wars fade from headlines; ceasefires are announced and quietly unravel; global attention, notoriously, moves on. Ghulam Bishar and Ubaydah have not. Each new anniversary of their campaign has brought not a retrospective, but another letter, another petition, another blood-written note — evidence that theirs was never a gesture staged for a single news cycle, but a discipline the two children have built into the rhythm of their young lives.
This International Day of Peace, as the United Nations calls on “everyday architects of peace” to invest in safety, dignity and cooperation for everyone, everywhere, every day, two children from Pakistan need no reminder of what that phrase is supposed to mean. Their message, repeated now across more than two years of letters, petitions, and — when words alone felt insufficient — their own blood, remains unchanged: peace cannot be a single date circled on a calendar. It must be demanded, in ink or otherwise, until every child, in Gaza and every other forgotten corner of the world, is finally allowed to simply be a child again.