I keep thinking about a woman called Fatima.
She was arrested on her way out of Gaza. She was going for medical treatment.
She was two months pregnant and she didn't know it.
She found out in a cell.
There is usually someone to tell. A husband, a mother, a friend on the phone at midnight.
She had a cell.
She carried him there. All of it. The sickness, the kicking, the not sleeping, the months of getting heavier inside a place she could not leave. Then she gave birth in custody, and they handed her a boy.
Youssef.
And then they kept him.
More than two years. So she had to raise a baby in a room.
Think about what that actually takes.
She fed him at night in the dark, because she couldn't choose when the light was on. She learned to tell from the sound of his breathing whether he was hungry or too hot, because there was nobody to ask and nothing else to go on.
When he was ill and babies are always ill, she held him and waited and hoped somebody would come.
She had nothing to give him but herself. No pram. No window to hold him up to. No garden, no street, no grandmother at the door.
So she became the whole world. Her face was his sky. Her voice was every sound he liked.
And she taught him to talk, which means she taught him words for things he had never seen.
She would have told him about the sea. About birds. About his grandmother's house, and the sun on a wall, and what the street outside smells like in the morning.
He learned to walk across a room you can cross in four steps.
His first tooth came through and there was no one to ring.
He would have smiled at the guards. Babies smile at everyone. He didn't know who they were. He'd have reached for them, the way babies do, and she would have had to watch that.
And here is the thing I can't put down.
He was happy.
Fatima and her son Youssef
He was. He had his mother, and she was there every hour of every day, and for a baby that's enough, that's everything. He'd have laughed in that room. He'd have played. He'd have thought the world was small and safe and made entirely of her.
She managed that. In a prison, with nothing, she gave her son a happy babyhood.
That is the most extraordinary thing any person has ever done and there was no one there to see it.
They were released when he was two. Not because someone decided it was wrong. As part of a trade. Nineteen Palestinian women let go in exchange for a videotape proving one Israeli soldier was still alive.
Nineteen women and a baby. For a tape.
And when she carried him out, he would have seen the sky for the first time.
Not a ceiling. Sky. No edges to it.
I think about a two-year-old meeting that, and how frightening it must be when everything you have ever known has walls, and I think he probably cried and hid his face in her neck.
She carried him out into Gaza. Sealed, blockaded, a place you also cannot leave.
From one enclosure to another. And it was the best day of her life.
He grew up there. Two years old during one war, six during the next, fifteen when this one began. He learned to read. He had a best friend. He had opinions about football. He got taller than her at some point and she'd have made a fuss about it.
His family called him their gift of victory.
In July, a drone struck their apartment. He was seventeen.
Fatima buried him.
The same hands. She held him on the day he was born in a cell with no window. She held him again seventeen years later under the rubble of her own home.
Nobody else on this earth was there for both.
Not one day. Born in a prison, released into a siege, killed in a strike. Never once somewhere he was free to walk out of.
A whole life, and not a single hour of freedom in it.
And Fatima was in that cell in 2008, which should tell you exactly how long this has been going on.
For Youssef, who was never free,
Hafsa