These are the days when the world gathers.
Tables are full. Homes are warm. The kind of togetherness that only comes around a few times a year. For millions of people across the world, these are the most treasured nights of the calendar. Nights that smell like food and feel like belonging.
I am at my table too. And I am missing my dad.
I miss him every year at this time. But grief has a way of showing up differently depending on the season. These are the nights the silence he left behind is deafening. My table is full. He is not at it. And I have learned that a full table without the person you love most is its own quiet kind of devastation.
For a long time, I thought that grief was only mine to carry. That the hole my father left was something only I could feel in the way I felt it.
And then Gaza's children got inside my heart. And they never left.
Not out of pity. Out of recognition. Because they are missing their parents too. Except their grief has no table to sit at. No warmth to soften it. No smell of food to make the absence bittersweet.
They miss their mothers and fathers in rubble. With empty stomachs. In a darkness that has no end in sight. I grieve in a home. They grieve in the wreckage of one. And somewhere in that distance between my table and their broken one, grief made us family.
These children have lost more than their parents. They have lost every single thing that made them feel like a child. Safety. Food. A bed. A future they could picture. Their lives have become a waiting room. Not for healing. Not for tomorrow. Just for whatever comes next.
Will there be food today or will there be nothing. Will we survive this night or won't we. That is the whole horizon for a child in Gaza right now. A waiting room with no door out.
No child should live like that. No child should know that kind of waiting.
My father taught me something about giving that I have carried with me every day since. He told me that when you give to someone in need, give with both hands. Not one. Both. Humble yourself. Lower yourself to their level. And see the person in front of you not as someone beneath you but as a part of your own self. Because they are. Every single one of them is.
Today I am asking you to give with both hands.
Not because Gaza's children need your pity. They don't. They need your humanity. They need to know that somewhere, at a full table, someone thought of them. Someone chose them. Someone said “your life matters and I am going to do something about it”.
Feed a child in Gaza today. It will not bring back what they have lost. But it will mean that today, in their waiting room, there was food. There was someone. There was proof that the world had not completely forgotten them.
My father would have given with both hands.
I hope you will too.
For Gaza's children, and for my dad,
Hafsa