The rain of missiles had finally stopped and the voices of kids playing in the streets could be heard again. The fog of absolute destruction vanished and it’s now clear to see what’s left over of our beautiful grieving city.
a few days after the 2008-Israeli-Agression on Gaza ended, I, a seven-year-old child at the time, and my brothers, one of whom was four years older than me and the other by six years, were walking around to witness the effects of the aggression on our neighborhood. We arrived at a residential tower that had been turned into rubble and ruins. We started looking through the rubble out of curiosity and suddenly my brother found a round piece of iron very similar to a tool used for baking bread. We took it and dusted it off, and we were very happy with this discovery. Joyfully, we brought it home to show our mother what we had found and to tell her to use it in the coming days, but little did we know that what we had in our hands might be our last supper. After a little while, we heard someone banging on the door of our house, and when we opened it, a strange face could be seen in front of our door telling us to quickly show him what we found. We brought him our “precious baking tool” and he examined it carefully and then asked to speak to one of our parents about an urgent matter. It turned out later that this man worked with the resistance groups, and he saw us heading home with what we found. It also became clear that what we thought was a “baking tool” was the head of one of the missiles fired by the Israeli forces on that apartment tower. We felt sheer fear we had never felt before, how our innocence almost killed us all! I still remember the expression on my mother’s face when the man told her the truth about what we had found. I am also still grateful that God’s will allow us to escape from a disaster that might have occurred.
A fatal innocence in the midst of a war.
