I found a clip this week that I cannot stop watching.
A Palestinian girl. Filmed in 2002. Asked about her future. She pauses, and then she says she does not think about her future anymore. That if she imagines one, it is a future of death. That she has stopped counting the dead because there are too many.
She is not crying. She says it the way you say something you have already accepted.
2002 is the year I was born.
The same year I came into the world building castles in my head, she was already dismantling hers. While I was taking my first breath somewhere safe and warm and full of possibility, she was standing in front of a camera in Gaza deciding that possibility was not something available to her. We arrived in the same year, she and I. Two girls. Same world. Completely different versions of what a future is allowed to look like.
I have spent my whole life dreaming. Not as a personality trait. As a way of moving through the world. I have wanted things that seemed impossible and gone and made them real. I have never once woken up and not believed that tomorrow could be different from today. That dreaming is so fundamental to who I am that I cannot imagine existing without it.
She gave it up before she knew what it was worth.
Not gradually. Not after years of disappointment. In one quiet sentence, on camera, with the stillness of someone who has already finished grieving something and arrived somewhere colder on the other side. A child who decided that hope was not something the world had set aside for her. And the devastating thing is she was not wrong. The world had not set it aside for her. The world had been proving her right her entire short life.
She stopped dreaming the year I started.
I keep asking myself where she is now.
Is she alive? After everything that has happened in Gaza in the twenty three years since that camera caught her face, is she still there? And if she is, does she look at what Gaza has become and feel anything except the confirmation of everything she already knew as a child?
I was her age once. I dreamed my way through it.
I cannot stop thinking about what she did instead.
This is not a new crisis.
That is the thing this clip forced me to sit with in a way I had not before. Gaza has been bleeding for longer than I have been alive. That girl was already exhausted by it before I took my first breath. Generation after generation of children have grown up in that place giving up on futures before they were old enough to want them properly. Told by the world, through its silence and its watching and its endless ability to do nothing, that the girl on camera in 2002 was always going to become the woman in rubble in 2026.
We have been watching for decades.
I do not want to watch anymore.
And I do not think you do either. That is why you are here, reading this, part of this work. Because something in you refused the watching and chose the doing instead. Because you decided that your voice and your presence in this fight meant something even when the scale of the suffering made it feel impossible to matter.
It matters.
Every child we reach in Gaza is proof that the world has not made its peace with this. That somewhere people are still fighting. Still showing up. Still refusing to let an entire generation grow up believing their only future is death. Still saying, through everything they do, that a child's dream is worth protecting even when the world around her has done everything it can to kill it.
That girl gave up on her future in 2002.
We have to be loud enough, present enough, relentless enough, that the next girl does not have to.
Get louder today.
Stay louder tomorrow.
Because they have been waiting for the world to notice for longer than either of us have been alive.
For the girl from 2002, wherever she is, and every dream Gaza never got to keep,
Hafsa
