February 28, 2024 - American military veterans burn their uniforms calling for a free Palestine, at a vigil for Aaron Bushnell in Portland, Oregon. [source]
‘I wish for death’ - Twelve-year-old Alma says. She fled bombing and shelling twice before the third place they sheltered was bombed, She was rescued from the rubble only to find out both her parents and all four of her siblings had been killed. She found her 18-month-old brother in an unimaginable state. Her little brother was beheaded from the rubble after the IOF massacred them.
Children in Gaza can tell an F-16 from an F-35 from a drone. They know a whole litany of things that are beyond their years. Things that they shouldn’t have to know.
Over 10,000 children have been killed in Gaza.
The children who have survived have seen their families, friends and neighbors killed by the Israeli army. They have seen near-death by starvation and death by suffocation, under the rubble and by explosion.
Children in Gaza do not have the luxury of death being a mystery. It is a daily presence.
If a child in Gaza is hungry, they know not to throw a tantrum. They have become used to feeling hunger. The same is true of the cold. Every child in Gaza now knows what it is to be unhoused, to sleep in a tent or on the streets in winter.
Oh Allah, I seek refuge in you from grief and sadness, from weakness and laziness, from miserableness and cowardliness and from being overcome by debt and over powered by others. then ask for anything else (forgiveness, paradise