There's an hour before sunrise that most people never see.
Three, four in the morning. The street is empty. It's cool, even in July. Nothing is open and nothing moves, and the only people out are the ones who've got up on purpose. Someone walking a dog that couldn't wait, a nurse coming off shift.
And in Muslim neighbourhoods it’s a bit different.
There's a prayer before dawn. Muslims get out of bed in the dark for it, every day of the year, and in the fasting month they're up earlier still. Eating something small before first light, then walking to the mosque while the rest of the city sleeps.
It's the safest hour there is. That's the thing. Nobody is out at that time except people being quietly good.
In Palestine, in July 2014, a boy of sixteen stepped out into it.
Someone had woken him. He'd have eaten something small before the fast started. Then he wore his shoes, the door, the empty road.
His mother knew where he was going.
That's the last thing she knew.
A car was moving through Jerusalem that night. Three men inside it, looking for a child to take.
They found one. Walking alone before sunrise, on his way to pray.
They pulled him into the car.
They drove him out to a forest. They beat him with what they had. Then someone brought a bottle of petrol, poured it over him, and set him alight.
Mohammed Abu Khdeir
He was still alive.
The autopsy found soot in his airways.
Sit with that, because I didn't understand it at first. Soot in the lungs means he was breathing. Breathing means conscious. It means he was there for it. Awake, pulling air into his body while his body burned.
Which means he knew.
He knew he was on fire. He felt all of it. He had thoughts while it was happening, and a boy who'd got out of bed in the night to pray would have had them about his mother, and about God, and then…
Pain.
And the air he pulled in to scream with was the smoke coming off himself.
He breathed his own ashes.
His name was Mohammed Abu Khdeir.
That was twelve years ago.
Last week, the man who did it died.
Yosef Haim Ben-David. He had a cardiac event. He was taken to hospital, where a medical team worked on him. Resuscitation, the full effort, everything they had.
When it failed, a short statement was released. A 42-year-old had died. His medical condition, they said, couldn't be disclosed, out of respect for privacy.
Read those two things next to each other.
People tried to save that man's life.
Nobody tried to save Mohammed's. The last hands on that boy were the ones holding the bottle.
And at the end, Ben-David's medical information was protected by law while Mohammed's burned body was examined, documented, and described in newspapers all over the world, because that is what's left of a child when there's nothing else to report.
One of them got privacy. The other got an autopsy.
He also got twelve more years than Mohammed did.
Mohammed is still sixteen. He will always be sixteen.
His father is called Hussein. His mother is Suha.
Hussein said once that whatever anyone decided, nothing would heal. The boy wasn't coming back.
He was right. Twelve years on, a man's heart gave out in a hospital bed with doctors standing over him, and Hussein and Suha still don't have their son.
There will be headlines this week with the killer's name in them. There always are.
So say the other one.
Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Sixteen. Up before dawn, walking to the mosque.
He isn't a story, or a symbol, or a turning point. He was a boy going to pray.
That's the name that should outlive this week.
Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Say it,
Hafsa