My dear child of Palestine,
I do not know your name.
And that is the first tragedy.
Because a child should be known- called by name,
answered when they speak,
held when they cry.
My own children were once your age. Five, perhaps.
An age of questions. Of laughter. Of certainty that the world, though large, was somehow safe.
My son once knew the names of world leaders- reciting them with the confidence only a child can carry. He believed the world was something that could be understood, perhaps even shaped.
Today, he no longer speaks of such things. Life, for him, moved forward.
It usually does- when it is allowed to.
And then I see you.
Not in a photograph alone- but in fragments.
A child walking through dust that should have been a street.
A face searching- not for toys, not for play – but for someone who might still be there.
Hands that hold not possibility – but memory.
And I am left with a question that does not leave me.
What becomes of a childhood that is interrupted not by time- but by force?
There is a story once told by Shah Rukh Khan- his young son, seeing a crowd, would say simply, “the peoples have come.”
You are among those peoples. Not distant. Not different.
Yours is a place within the same fragile human story that we all claim to belong to.
Pope Francis once spoke of humility in judgement- of recognising the limits of our right to decide over others.
And yet, here you are – living the consequences of decisions made far beyond your reach.
Gaza was never a place of ease.
But it was a place of life.
Of shared meals- however small. Of voices- however constrained. Of moments- however brief.
Now, for many, it is something else.
Not gone.
But changed beyond recognition.
The world continues.
It always does.
New conflicts emerge. New headlines rise. Attention shifts.
And in that movement, there is a quiet fear – That your suffering becomes something we grow accustomed to.
My dear child,
I will not pretend to understand your reality. Imagination fails where experience begins.
But I write to you because silence feels like a form of absence I cannot accept.
There are those who will argue, Those who will explain,
Those who will justify.
There always are. But beyond all of that, there is something simpler.
You were meant to grow. To learn. To become. And somewhere along the way, that path was broken.
So tonight, wherever you are:
If the sky above you feels too large, If the ground beneath you feels uncertain, if the world has become something you do not recognise:
know this:
There are those who have not turned away.
A child should inherit a future- not survive a history.
