She was just a little girl.
Her arms wrapped around a gallon of water. Heavy, almost bigger than her because her family was thirsty.
She walked barefoot through ruins. Streets that no longer exist.
Her tiny feet cut by glass. Her breath slow from hunger.
But still, she walked.
Because love makes you do impossible things.
And then in the blink of an eye. She was gone.
A drone hovered overhead.
A man behind a screen watched her.
He saw her size.
He saw the water.
He knew she was a child.
And he pressed the button anyway.
A bomb dropped.
Tell me, what did she do?
What crime did she commit?
Was it carrying water for her family?
Was it refusing to die quietly?
What kind of war looks at a little girl with a gallon of water and decides she’s the target?
What kind of human being focuses a missile on a child and calls it “defense”?
Her water spilled into the dust.
Her small body shattered where her hope ended.
She was someone’s daughter. Someone’s whole world.
She was the reason her mother kept breathing.
And now, her mother is screaming into rubble,
digging with bare hands for pieces of a child that should still be alive.
And for what?
This isn’t war.
This is a massacre.
This is punishment for being born in Gaza.
This is cruelty so sharp it makes you choke just trying to name it.
She didn’t hold a weapon.
She held water and the water bled into the dirt.
And what was left of her body… was scattered in pieces.
Her mother found the water before she found her.
Imagine that.
Finding a puddle of blood before you find your child.
And then imagine this:
You pour another cup of coffee. You scroll past the headline.
You tell yourself, “It’s too much. I can’t look.”
She carried water barefoot through hell,
and the world couldn’t even carry her story for more than a second.
This is Gaza.
This is what they’re doing to our children.
And I want you to ask yourself:
What does it mean to live in a world where a child’s last act of love is met with a missile and we call that “normal”?
Writing what the rubble cannot speak,
Hafsa