On the morning of September 4, my eight-year-old niece Joody woke up bright-eyed and excited and suggested that we celebrate her father’s birthday. It had been 25 days since we lost her father, Moataz Rajab, in the Israeli army’s massacre at Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City. He was one of more than 100 civilian victims who had sought refuge in the school with his family.
Although Joody knew her dad was gone, it was clear she was trying to process a date on the calendar that had always been special to her and her siblings.
As the family, including my sister, Joody's mother, was still grieving, no one was quite sure how to handle the situation. We exchanged glances, hoping one of us would step in and take charge.
Everyone deals with shock differently, and we all knew this was Joody's way of dealing with his father's death.
Her grandparents hugged her and kissed her on the forehead and tried to explain to her that it was strange to celebrate the birthday of someone who had passed away so recently. Other family members also told her that it would be strange to sing a birthday song for someone who is sadly no longer with us. There was no birthday cake in sight either; Gaza’s bakeries were struggling to make bread, let alone produce such “luxury” items.
We knew the best way to handle this was not to get excited, but to stay calm and try to reason with Joody.
Disappointed, my niece nodded and went on with her day. But an hour later, she came running back to her mother with a counterproposal. “How about we celebrate Dad’s birthday by reading the Quran instead of singing him a birthday song?” Joody asked determinedly.
We find refuge in the Quran in good times and bad, so we all thought it made sense to remember Moataz by reading holy verses.
We also managed to find a solution to the “birthday cake problem.” We found a lady who had flour and was willing to bake seven slices of cake for the 14 we were going to have.
A few hours later, we gathered in what was left of our house in the Shujayea neighborhood. We sat in a circle between walls riddled with bullet holes, damaged by artillery shells and decorated with drawings that children had made since the beginning of the war.
Joody began reading Al-Fatihah, or the first chapter of the Quran, standing under the damaged roof that his grandfather had repaired with metal sheets to make our house a little more habitable. As he recited the verses, both his mother and grandmother cried while everyone else sat solemnly, each of us trying to control the deep sense of loss.
As she read the verses aloud, I thought about the toll this war has taken on children. The Israeli military has killed more than 17,000 children, including more than 700 newborns. It has injured tens of thousands, including some 3,000 who have lost one or more limbs. It has orphaned more than 19,000 children, condemning them to live the rest of their lives with the trauma of losing one or both parents at a young age. Our Joody is one of them.
They say time heals all wounds, but how can we, the adults around her, hold her hand and help her through the immense pain she feels as a genocide continues to unfold around us? How can we help children like her cope with the psychological trauma that continues to grow with every Israeli airstrike, every massacred family, every lost mom or dad?
Hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza have lost their childhood, forced to flee their homes to live in squalor, without education, adequate shelter and any sense of security. They wander through streets filled with rubble, rubbish and sewage, searching for food or water to survive, collecting firewood and witnessing death and despair at every corner.
This genocidal war has revealed the cruel world we live in, a world that is more concerned about container traffic in the Red Sea than the lives of 41,000 human beings.
But hopelessness is not part of the Palestinian people's vocabulary. Resilience is.
After Joody finished reading the Quran, we brought out the cake. As generous as her father, she had insisted on paying the exorbitant price from her own savings.
We savoured every bite of the cake to make it last as long as possible, just as we cherish our memories of Moataz. As I looked at Joody, I realised that he lives on in the kind and bright children he left behind.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
