I want to speak to you today about stuffed animals.
I've written to you about so much this year. Death. Rage. Happiness. My life. Children picking up pieces of their parents blown up body parts.
I thought I was familiar with it all..
But this one?
A tent. That's all it was. Fabric, plastic sheeting, rope, four poles pushed into sand. The kind of thing that comes down in wind. The kind of thing you live in after the house is gone, and then after the second house is gone.
Someone looked at that and blew it up with a missile.
There was a boy inside. No older than ten.
And around where he had been, lying in the sand, were his stuffed animals.
Two of them. Small. The kind that fit under a child's arm.
Torn open. Thrown across the ground. Dark in patches. Wet through.
I don't know the kid’s name. I've stopped expecting to be given names.
But the toys tell me the rest of it.
He took them with him.
Sit with that for one second. When that family ran. And they ran, everyone in Gaza has run, three times, five times however many times. They could carry almost nothing. Water. Documents. A blanket. Whatever you can hold while moving fast with children.
And he made room for two stuffed animals.
He decided he would not be made to leave them behind.
Maybe he carried them the whole way himself. Under his arm. Refusing to put them down, the way children do.
...Maybe he carried them the whole way himself. Under his arm. Refusing to put them down, the way children do.
And he did it. He got them there.
Through the running, the roads, the nights, the hunger. He carried two stuffed animals across a war and he never once put them down.
It took a missile to make him let go.
That's what happened in that tent. Not a boy losing his toys. A boy who had held on to something for two years being finally, forcibly made to release it.
They were found in the sand around him. Apart from each other. Apart from him. Because a blast doesn't leave anything where it was.
And they still have the shape of him in them.
That's what I can't get past. Whatever a child's arms do to a soft thing after years of holding it every single night, that's pressed into them. Still there. His.
Those two toys are the last things on this earth that know what he felt like.
He carried what he loved across a war and never dropped it.
We couldn't carry him for one more day.
That's the whole thing. A ten-year-old did the harder job. He kept his. We didn't keep ours.
And here I am, safe, my family asleep down the hall.
There are children in tents across Gaza tonight. Thousands of them. Arms around something soft, listening for the sound.
We can't give them a roof. God knows I wish we could.
But we can reach them. Food. Water. Medicine. Blankets. Delivered by women who never left, who are out among those tents right now.
He didn't leave his behind.
Don't leave him.
With his bears in my hands and nowhere to put them,
Hafsa