It is World Cup season and the whole world has lost its mind in the best possible way.
Flags from windows. Jerseys worn to work. Children glued to screens watching men do impossible things with a round ball, already deciding which one they want to be when they grow up. There is something about football that needs no translation. It just lands. In every language. In every child who has ever seen a ball on the ground and felt that pull before their brain has even finished deciding to move.
I have been watching it too. Thinking about what it means to grow up loving something the whole world loves with you. That particular belonging. That joy with nothing underneath it.
And then I found out what someone did with that feeling in Gaza and Lebanon.
Cluster bombs have been engineered to look exactly like footballs.
Same size. Same shape. Same black and white panels. Not a design flaw. Not a coincidence. A deliberate decision made by people who understood something very precise about children.
That the joy comes before the thought.
That a child who sees a football is already running before they have decided to run. That the body moves first. That the happiness arrives first. That there is a window, a fraction of a second, between seeing and thinking, and that window is exactly what they designed for.
They built a weapon for the gap between a child's eyes and a child's mind.
That is someone choosing to kill children by first making them happy.
I want you to think about a child you love.
A nephew. A little sibling. A neighbour's kid. The one who kicks everything in sight, bottles, cushions, anything even vaguely round, with that specific deranged joy that belongs only to children who have decided they are going to be a footballer when they grow up.
Now put that child in Gaza.
Same child. Same joy. Same automatic lunge toward anything round. Except the streets are rubble and the sky has been full of things falling from it for so long that falling things are just weather now. And somewhere in the dust, among the broken concrete and the ash, there is something on the ground that looks exactly like a ball.
Your child sees it.
What happens next was designed in advance by someone who will never have to watch it.
The World Cup is the most watched event in human history.
Billions of people. One ball. The entire planet agreeing, for a few weeks, that this round object and what you do with it is worth stopping everything for. Children in every country on earth going to sleep dreaming of the player they are going to become. The shape of a football meaning the same thing in every language.
Hope. Play. The future.
Someone took that consensus, that universal innocent meaning, and put explosives inside it.
They did not do it despite knowing what a football means to children.
They did it because of it.
I do not have soft words for this.
What I have is a rage so clean it has nowhere to go except here, into this email, and then into your hands.
The children in Gaza are still playing. In the spaces between bombings because children cannot stop being children no matter what the world drops on them. Still running. Still having that instinct. Still being exactly what someone decided to use against them.
And the only thing standing between that child and being forgotten is whether enough people felt something and refused to let it fade.
You felt something reading this.
Do not let it fade.
Give today.
Not because it fixes the rage.
Because the children cannot wait for us to finish being angry.
For every child who just wanted to kick a ball,
Hafsa