There's a girl I have never been able to forget.
I've seen so many images from Gaza. Children sleeping in rubble. Babies too weak to cry. Mothers clutching their dead, as if holding tight could bring them back.
But this... this always breaks something in me whenever i remember
A little girl. Eight years old.
And at first glance, I thought: cancer.
That's what I told myself, because that's what my mind could understand.
Her head is bare. Not a single strand of hair left.
Her tiny face pale, her eyes too tired, too old for age.
But this isn't cancer.
It's the monsters.
Monsters with wings made of steel and bombs for teeth.
It's fear.
The kind of fear that lives in your chest, in your bones, in your blood.
The kind of fear that makes your heart race so hard at night, waiting for the next bomb, the next blast, that your body gives in.
The kind of fear that steals not just hair, but childhood.
Her mother said it started with the drones. The jets.
The nights when sleep wouldn't come.
The nights when she'd cry so hard she made herself sick.
The days when she stopped speaking.
And then one morning, she woke up and the hair was on her pillow.
On the floor.
On her clothes.
Until there was none left.
She looks like a cancer patient.
But it was fear that made her hair fall out.
And I still can't stop thinking about her.
What does war do to a child, that her own body turns against her?
What kind of terror makes hair fall out faster than bombs can drop?
What kind of world lets this happen, and moves on?
And what do we do?
We scroll. We sigh. We change the channel.
But she's still there.
In a tent that isn't a home.
In a body that has carried too much terror for too long.
If this were my daughter, my niece, my sister. What would I do?
We like to think war kills with bullets and bombs.
But sometimes, war kills in quieter ways.
It kills with fear so sharp it steals a child's breath.
With terror so deep it makes their hair fall out.
With nights so long that even toddlers' hearts give up.
And what breaks me the most?
The world keeps moving.
She'd be nine now. Ten, maybe. And nothing has stopped. The drones are still up there. The nights are still long. Whatever her body was doing to her then, it has had another year to do it.
I have wondered a hundred times whether her hair ever grew back. Whether there was ever a single night quiet enough to let it.
While children sit there, waiting for the next strike.
While she looks in the mirror and wonders what she did to deserve looking like this.
A little girl, made to look like a cancer patient by nothing but fear.
What kind of war does that? What kind of world lets it happen?
Please don't look away. Don't let her be just another story.
Say her name. Share her truth. Let her haunt you, the way she should.
Because if we don't break for her, if we don't rage for her, what's left of our humanity?
With grief that won't quiet,
Hafsa