GAZA, (PIC)
“If you wore the invisibility cap, where would you go?” – This question was posed to a group of children in the displacement camps in Gaza, but the answer that came from most of them – at first glance – may be shocking, in that they still “dream of Gaza and returning to it,” but it reflects the depth and truth of the resilience of this group that is the primary target of the ongoing Israeli aggression for the past ten months, leaving behind tens of thousands of martyrs, most of them children and women.
The writer and researcher Al-Maqda’ad Jamil conveys this image and this dream of the children of Gaza in the displacement centers, saying: Today, during the storyteller activity of reading stories to the children in the displacement camps in Deir al-Balah, the children were asked “If you wore the invisibility cap, where could you go?”
He adds that most of them said one word, one that some will not believe. Just one word: to Gaza.
Al-Maqda’ad notes that they all long to return, they all dream of Gaza!
The dream of going to paradise
But Al-Maqda’ad conveys another dream, but one of great pain, when he says: Zaina, Jannat and Lujain, my sisters’ daughters in northern Gaza, in an innocent word yesterday they said “We wish to be martyred so that we can eat everything in Paradise!”
He continues saying, “The wretched world leaves our children hungry. It brings them some flour and bread, to widen the silence and say ‘there is no famine’, while not introducing a single gram of any other food that strengthens their bones or helps them escape the horror of the rockets.
He emphasizes that “our revenge is long and great with this world!”
Longing for his classmates
Another child from the Gaza Strip, with eyes filled with tears, when asked about something he misses, said, “We have been displaced from the beginning of the war and have not returned to our homes, in Al-Shuja’iyya, at all, I miss my classmates.”
Ahmad misses his martyred mother
Ahmad Al-Da’our, a child from Gaza, recounts what happened to him six months ago before the martyrdom of his mother, saying he had been separated from her due to the Israeli bombardment.
Ahmad went out searching for his mother where the place where she was martyred, only to be surprised by the occupation soldiers trying to shoot him.
Then he tells, with tears, how he is greatly missing his mother.
“I wish I could get treatment and become like you all” – with these words, the child Mazyouna, with great difficulty in pronunciation due to an injury to her face, expresses her wish to seek treatment outside the Gaza Strip, and she appeals to the world to help her in this so that she can return to her normal life like other children.
Among those longing to return to their homes from which they were displaced, others are longing for their mothers, and a third group longing for their classmates and schoolmates, and those who hope to go abroad for treatment after suffering a fatal injury, and many others who suffer coma in the hospital beds destroyed by the Israeli occupation army.
The dreams of the children of Gaza are collapsing every day in the face of the Israeli brutal war machine, becoming mere wishes in an unjust world that witnesses the magnitude of the crime and does not extend a helping hand to stop the aggression and allow them to materialize their tender, innocent dreams that were stolen by the ruthless aggression.
