She was four.
Sitting in her push chair.
The sun was out.
There were pigeons.
People passed, some with ice cream, some with bags of bread.
She had a small toy in her hand.
Plastic. Yellow. A duck maybe.
Her mother was close.
Leaning down, saying something —
It doesn’t matter now.
A moment
split open by steel and fire.
There was no warning.
No siren.
Just a noise that ended the day.
When they found her,
the chair was twisted,
wheels splayed like the legs of a broken insect.
There was no duck.
Just a shoe.
Just blood.
Her father arrived later.
He had run through cordons,
through people shouting his name.
He fell to his knees,
not because of faith,
but because there was no strength left.
He did not weep.
He opened his mouth
and nothing came.
The mother sat beside the wreckage.
They tried to lift her.
She would not go.
She stayed with what was left.
She rocked forward and back.
The air around her filled with things that were not screams.
She was four.
There is no metaphor for that.
No reason.
No lesson.
Just the quiet truth
that men far away
will sleep tonight.
And she
will never grow old.
Murdered for being Palestinian
They were waiting.
Dust on their faces.
Hands out, not in anger, not in defiance—
in hope.
For flour. For rice.
For anything that said
you are still alive.
There were 68 of them.
Men. Women.
Children with ribs like fence wire.
Mothers holding onto the air
where their babies used to be.
Old men who had once farmed olive trees,
now leaning on canes,
counting each day
not for meaning,
but for survival.
They were not fighters.
Not soldiers.
Not enemies.
They were people who stood in a line
because that is all they had left.
Then came the strike.
No warning.
No chance.
The sky didn’t care.
The men who gave the order didn’t blink.
The world didn’t speak.
Bodies scattered
like broken sacks.
Blood ran into sand
that has seen too much blood.
One child’s hand still clutched a number—
his turn in line.
Another had his mouth open,
still mid-sentence,
as if saying
please.
There are no words left
for the fathers who dug
through limbs and cloth
to find a face
they once kissed.
No justice
for the mother who held her daughter
like a shell,
rocking her gently,
as if sleep might undo
what missiles had done.
The world watched.
Said things.
Held meetings.
Wrote reports.
Nothing changed.
They will say
it was a mistake.
A tragedy.
Collateral.
But it was murder.
Murder in daylight.
Murder by choice.
Murder seen and permitted.
And the line will form again tomorrow.
With fewer faces.
With more ghosts.
Still waiting.
Still hoping
the world might remember
how to be human.
Broken Author 