small hours

We want the UK Government to launch an inquiry into any British involvement in Israeli operations in Gaza. This petition is so close to the 100,000 needed to be considered for a debate in Parliament. Please sign & share - let's get it over the line! petition.parliament.uk/petit…

I used to think there were small things the war had not managed to take away from children, and one of them was the joy of getting a new schoolbag. Three weeks ago, I posted about a campaign to provide school supplies for a school in Jabalia with more than 1,200 students. We raised enough for around 200 children, so we decided to start with the orphans. Since then, I had been waiting for the photos. In my head, I imagined a child going to school carrying his notebooks in a plastic bag, and then receiving a new schoolbag with his favorite superhero on it, along with new notebooks and pencils of his own. I was waiting to see their happiness, glad that we had managed to give them one small, beautiful moment in the middle of all this misery. But when the photos arrived, I did not feel what I expected to feel. I kept looking at the children’s faces. The children are broken. Their spirits are heavy. Some are holding their bags and looking at the camera without smiling. Some look much older than they are. Even the small thing I thought would make them happy no longer seems to reach them the way I imagined. That was when I realized something we have tried not to think about: Gaza’s children have grown up. Not only in age. They have become more aware of what is happening to them. In a normal life, a child does not wait for a stranger to give him a schoolbag. He goes to the shop with his mother or father, struggles to choose between this one and that one, wants the red one and does not like the blue one, and maybe gets upset because his father refuses to buy the more expensive one. These ordinary details are part of childhood. Our children take whatever they are given and say thank you. The war has taken from them even the luxury of saying to their mother or father: I don’t like this one. I want that one. And from some of the children in these photos, the war has taken much more than that. It took the father himself. The father who was supposed to hold his child’s hand and take him to buy his schoolbag is now the reason that child carries the word “orphan.” So when I looked at the photos again, I no longer saw 200 schoolbags and sets of supplies. I saw children beginning to understand why they live like this. Why their families cannot afford even the simplest things. Why their schoolbags, notebooks, and sometimes their clothes come from people they do not know. And why there are things that were supposed to come from their fathers, but their fathers are no longer there. People always say that children forget quickly, that it is easy to take a child away from fear and war for a little while with a toy, some sweets, or a new schoolbag. I used to believe that. Maybe I wanted to believe it. But the wounds of Gaza’s children have become too deep to hide behind a schoolbag with a superhero on it. They kept waiting for this war to end until they grew up inside it, and with them grew their understanding of everything they had lost. When a child understands that what he receives from strangers is not really a gift, but a tiny piece of the life he had every right to receive from his own family, in his own home, then we have lost something much bigger than homes, schools, or money. We are already too late. The children have begun to understand what we have done to their childhood. #SurvivalTestimony