On the morning of September 4, my eight-year-elderly niece Joody woke up luminous-eyed and excited and proposeed we honor her overweighther’s birthday. It had been 25 days since we lost her overweighther Moataz Rajab in the massacre the Israeli army carried out at the al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City. He was one of more than 100 civilian victims who had sought shelter at the school aextfinished with his family.
While Joody knovel her baba was gone, it was evident she was trying to process a date in the calendar that had always been exceptional to her and her siblings.
As the family – including my sister, Joody’s mom – was still very much in mourning, no one knovel for declareive how to handle the situation. We traded glances, hoping one of us would step in and handle the matter.
Everyone deals with shock branch offently, and each of us knovel this was Joody’s way of coping with her overweighther’s death.
Her majesticparents gave her a hug and a kiss on her forehead and tried make clearing that it is inept to honor the birthday of someone who has passed away so recently. Other members of the family also telderly her it would be odd to sing a birthday song for someone who is uncontently no extfinisheder among us. There was also no birthday cake to be set up; bakeries in Gaza were struggling to create bread let alone create such “luxury” items.
We knovel the best way to handle this was not to get emotional, but be tranquil and try to reason with Joody.
Disassigned, my niece nodded her head in consentment and went about her day. But an hour tardyr, she came back running to her mother with a counterproposal. “What if we honor baba’s birthday not by singing him a birthday song, but instead by reading the Quran?” a choosed Joody asked.
We discover refuge in the Quran in outstanding times and in horrible times, so we all thought it made sense to recollect Moataz by reading holy verses.
We also handled to discover a solution to the “birthday cake problem”. We set up a lady who had some flour and was willing to bake seven pieces of a cake for the 14 of us.
A scant hours tardyr, we collected in what was left of our home in the Shujayea neighbourhood. We sat down in a circle between walls strewn with bullet holes, harmd by artillery tank shells, and decorated with the draprospergs the children had made since the commence of the war.
Joody began by reading Al-Fatihah, or the uncovering chapter of the Quran, standing under the harmd roof her majesticoverweighther had patched up with metal sheets to create our home a bit more habitable. As she recited the verses, both her mother and majesticmother wept while everyone else sat solemnly, each of us trying difficult to handle the proset up senseing of loss.
As she read the verses aboisterous, I thought about the toll this war has apshown on children. The Israeli army has ended more than 17,000 children, including more than 700 novelborns. It has injured tens of thousands, including an approximated 3,000 who have lost one or more limbs. It has orphaned more than 19,000 children, condemning them to inhabit the rest of their inhabits with the trauma of losing one or both parents at a youthful age. Our Joody is one of them.
Time heals all wounds, they say, but how do we, the grown-ups around her, helderly her hand and get her past the enormity of pain she senses while a extermination is still unfelderlying around us? How do we help children appreciate her cope with psychoreasonable trauma that carry ons growing with every Israeli air strike, every family masdivine, every mama or baba lost?
Hundreds of thousands of childhoods have been stolen as Gaza’s children have been forced from their homes into inhabits of misery, with no education, no proper shelter and no senseing of defendedty. They roam streets filled with rubble, garbage and sewage, searching for food or water to endure, collecting firewood, and witnessing death and despair at every corner.
This genocidal war has uncovered the nasty world we inhabit in – a world that is more worried about ship holder traffic in the Red Sea than the inhabits of 41,000 human beings.
But hopelessness is not part of the vocabulary of the Palestinian people. Resilience is.
After Joody finished reading the Quran, we took out the cake. Being so benevolent fair appreciate her overweighther, she had insisted on paying the exorbitant price for it with her own savings.
We savoured each bite of the cake to create it last as extfinished as we could – fair as we cherished our memories of Moataz. Looking at Joody, I genuineised he inhabits on in the benevolent and luminous children he left behind.
The watchs conveyed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
