There are things children do that stop you completely.
I saw a little girl in Gaza playing with her doll this week. She took a piece of tape. Pressed it over her doll's mouth. Smoothed down the edges. Then she held the doll up and looked at it with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has recreated something exactly right.
I have not been able to breathe properly since.
She has seen this done to a real person.
Someone whose face she loved, taken from in front of her. Hands bound, mouth covered, lifted away by people who did not slow down or look back. And then the door and then the silence and then just a name. A name the family says carefully now, in a particular way, the way you hold something you are afraid of losing.
She was small enough to still be holding a doll when she watched that happen.
So she went home and showed her doll what the world had shown her. Because children do not store what they have witnessed. They play it. They turn it over in their hands until they understand it or until they grow up, whichever comes first.
More than 350 Palestinian children under the age of eighteen are in prison right now.
Sit with that before you read on.
Each one of them left behind a name a mother is saying into the dark tonight. Each one of them was taken the same way this little girl watched someone get taken. And somewhere in Gaza she is playing with a doll whose mouth is taped shut, smoothing down the edges, recreating with her small certain hands the last thing she saw before someone she loved disappeared.
She understood what was happening before most of the world admitted it was.
I keep thinking about what her hands know now that they did not know before.
What the world has already taught them. What games she will keep playing as she gets older, what she will carry into adulthood, what kind of woman she will become after a childhood that handed her this.
She is still young enough that not everything has been decided yet. Still small enough that there are things her hands have not learned. Still here, still holding a doll, still a child in the middle of something that has been trying very hard to take that from her.
Your gift today is for what is still left.
For the part of her the world has not yet reached.
Go and give before it does.
For every child whose play became a goodbye they didn't know how to say,
Hafsa