Kevin Mc Loughlin

Since yesterday, I have returned again and again to the photographs of four children who died beside their mother when heavy rain sent rocks crashing down upon the tent in which they had sought refuge. I have looked at their faces until I could scarcely bear it, yet I have been unable to turn away. They were from Jabalia. From my own neighborhood. They had fled south after the Israeli army took control of their area, leaving their homes behind the Yellow Line. They had abandoned everything they had ever known, carrying nothing but the hope that somewhere, they might be allowed to live. But death, from which they had fled so far, had followed them. It found them beneath a canvas roof, where even the rain had become an enemy. Yet it is not only the manner of their deaths that torments me. It is the thought of their lives. What had these children known of the world? I try to imagine their brief passage through it, those few years that should have been only the beginning of a long and beautiful story. Perhaps one was born to the thunder of bombs, and the first light that entered his eyes was the light of a world already burning. Perhaps another spoke his first word while his mother trembled at the sound of an aircraft. One may have taken his first uncertain steps upon the floor of a tent. Another may have celebrated his birthday while his parents searched desperately for bread. And the eldest? He had scarcely begun to understand life before men decided that war would be the world in which he must grow. What a terrible thing, to be born into a world and never be allowed to discover its beauty! They should have known the innocent happiness of ordinary days. The delight of running beneath trees, of returning from school with some marvelous discovery to tell their mother, of waking on Eid morning to find new clothes beside their beds. They should have known the sweet impatience of falling asleep dreaming of a toy, certain that tomorrow would bring something wonderful. And beyond those small joys, how much more was waiting for them! There should have been years of friendship, laughter, and foolish adventures remembered with tenderness. There should have been the first bewilderment of love, the trembling of a hand held for the first time, the happiness of discovering that another heart could beat for theirs. There should have been a day, twenty years from now, when they would look back upon their childhood and smile at memories whose beauty they had not understood while living them. An entire world was waiting to unfold before them. And of all that life should have given them, what did they receive? Fear. Hunger. Exile. The sound of bombs. The sight of their parents struggling to keep them alive. And then death. Four children, innocent even of the reasons for the war that had swallowed their childhoods, spent their few years struggling for the simple right to remain alive. And in the end, they died. Tell me, in all the tragedies written by human hands, have you ever encountered a story more pitiless than this? What novelist would dare invent such cruelty without fearing that his readers would accuse him of exaggeration? And yet this is no invention. These children existed. They had names, faces, voices, little desires, and hearts that longed for happiness like those of every other child. How monstrous is a world in which a child comes into life with all its promises before him, only to spend his few years struggling to remain alive. And how much more monstrous that, after all his suffering, even that little should be denied him. #SurvivalTestimony