Yesterday was the “anniversary”, and everyone said the same number.
Three years.
Before we go near that number, try something with me.
Think of a child from Gaza. One you've actually seen. Not a statistic. A face, from a photo or a video that stopped you at some point in the last three years.
You've got one. Everyone has.
Now say their name.
I couldn't either.
I've written to you about them all year.
The boy eating fistfuls of sand because there was nothing else. The girl whose hair fell out on her pillow from fear alone. The child who took three raisins and fainted in the street from terror at being caught. The boy who stared at a wall for an entire day because there was nobody left to look at. The boy whose stuffed animals lay torn in the sand around where he had been.
I don't know a single one of their names.
In every letter I have sent you, they are "a boy." "A little girl." "A child."
That's all I was ever given.
And it made me feel sick this week, because I'm the one who wrote them. I cried over some of those letters. And I can't tell you what any of those children were called, or what they wanted to be, or what their mothers shouted up the stairs when dinner was ready.
They each had a name. Chosen before they were born. Said out loud a hundred times a day for years.
Nobody will ever say it again. And nobody outside that family ever learned it, because there was no one left to tell us.
So they became numbers. And numbers you can read over breakfast.
We all do. That's the part nobody admits.
I have watched a child die on my screen and then, within the same minute, wondered what to make for dinner. I've put my phone down after something unbearable and picked straight back up with a conversation about nothing.
Not because I stopped caring. Because nobody can hold that at full volume for three years, so the body quietly turns it down.
That's what three years has done to us.
It hasn't made us cruel. It's made us calm. Which is worse, and far more useful to them.
Be honest for a second. The first dead child you saw ruined your week. You couldn't finish your food.
What did the last one do? How long did you look? four seconds? Two?
That's what should be grieved on an anniversary. Not only what's happened to them. What's happened to us.
And then the number itself.
Three years is not how long this has been happening. Three years is how long we've been watching.
There are grandmothers in those tents who were children when it started. Whose mothers were children when it started. Families moved four times over in one lifetime, told each time it was temporary.
Seventy-seven years of temporary.
We arrived late and called it the beginning.
I won't ask you to feel more than you can. Nobody holds this at full volume, and anyone who says they do is lying.
But notice the speed. Notice how fast your thumb moves now compared to three years ago.
That speed is the only victory anyone has won here, and it was won against us.
So when you see the next one today and you will. Stop for one breath. Long enough for it to be a child again instead of a number.
They were never given names.
Don't let them become numbers as well.
For everyone I only ever called "a boy,"
Hafsa
