Nadaا I cropped part of the image because I couldn’t bear to see it in full. She was so small, soaked in her own blood, as if childhood itself were bleeding before our eyes.
This is the head of the child Julia Al-Balawi, an eight-year-old girl who was killed today by drone fire west of Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip.
What struck me was not only the blood, but her neatly styled hair. That hairstyle little girls ask their mothers for with innocent joy, and the colorful hair clips scattered through her strands like fragments of an unfinished celebration.
I think of her mother now…
Will she stand before what remains of her daughter, unable to believe what she sees?
Will she reach out with trembling hands to remove those clips from her hair and hide them in her pocket, as the last remaining trace of Julia?
Will she hold them to her chest whenever longing overwhelms her, breathing in the scent of the daughter who left before she could grow up?
What heart could bear such pain?
And what mother could survive a memory like this?
All I know is that those colorful hair clips were made to adorn little girls’ braids on their way to school, to accompany their laughter in playgrounds and gardens—not to be torn from their hair over shrouds.
In Gaza, even the simplest details of childhood have become witnesses to loss, and even the small adornments of girls have turned into elegies hanging at the doors of mothers.
https://gofund.me/83e09b493
#Gaza
#Julia_AlBalawi
This is the head of the child Julia Al-Balawi, an eight-year-old girl who was killed today by drone fire west of Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza Strip.
What struck me was not only the blood, but her neatly styled hair. That hairstyle little girls ask their mothers for with innocent joy, and the colorful hair clips scattered through her strands like fragments of an unfinished celebration.
I think of her mother now…
Will she stand before what remains of her daughter, unable to believe what she sees?
Will she reach out with trembling hands to remove those clips from her hair and hide them in her pocket, as the last remaining trace of Julia?
Will she hold them to her chest whenever longing overwhelms her, breathing in the scent of the daughter who left before she could grow up?
What heart could bear such pain?
And what mother could survive a memory like this?
All I know is that those colorful hair clips were made to adorn little girls’ braids on their way to school, to accompany their laughter in playgrounds and gardens—not to be torn from their hair over shrouds.
In Gaza, even the simplest details of childhood have become witnesses to loss, and even the small adornments of girls have turned into elegies hanging at the doors of mothers.
https://gofund.me/83e09b493
#Gaza
#Julia_AlBalawi
