Afrasianet - Maryam Mushtawi - In a corner of Gaza that had been extinguished by shelling, a child appeared. She was holding her doll, as if holding her little heart, holding a white bag in her other hand, looking for food scraps in the garbage. She doesn't know the meaning of war, she doesn't understand the news or the statements, all she knows is that her stomach is screaming, her doll is silent, and the whole world is passing by around her without paying attention.

She would bend over, lift a bag, contemplate the crumbs and remnants in it, and then gently put it down. Her eyes are small, but they look like windows on a defeated homeland.

She seems to be looking for her mother among the garbage, for a bosom that will restore to her the warmth of sleep and the peace of innocence. The doll is the house that was demolished, it is the mother who is absent, it is the hope that has not yet been bombed.

As the cars pass by, the conscience of the world also passes by and does not stop.

The child walking barefoot on the ashes of the city is not a scene in a movie or a headline in the newscast, she is a wound walking on the ground.

With every step you take, humanity insults itself anew.

How many statements have been issued, how many slogans have been raised, and how many children like them are searching the garbage for life?

A child drags bags of leftover bread, as she drags her exhausted age before it begins, and carries her doll because her heart needs something to remember that she is still a child.

She walks on the edge of the cliff and smiles at her doll, as if to tell her, "Don't be afraid, we'll find something to eat." Beneath her feet, the dry bread sheets break, and a smell that resembles a mixture of bread and death rises.

It is the smell of Gaza, the smell of survival that no longer resembles life. In a fleeting moment, the child raised her head and looked up at the sky, as if to ask her, "Is there bread in heaven?

Are there dolls that don't die?" and then she continued her research with patience that is only suitable for adults. She walks alone, but behind her is a whole generation of hungry people, carrying the same dolls, looking in the same places.

She is not an unknown child, she is the daughter of every house that has lost its bread, every mother has lost its sleep, and every country has lost its memory.

When she puts the remnants in her bag, she gathers the crumbs of the entire world, putting in it the silence of the United Nations, the helplessness of politicians, and the hypocrisy of civilized people who are afraid of stray dogs and do not see a child looking for a morsel among the garbage. In the last photo, she walks away, with a doll on her chest and a bag in her hand, as if balancing innocence and hunger.

Her small steps instill in the ground a bigger question than any speech: How did hunger become the daily spectacle of a 21st-century child?

The child who searched for bread among the garbage will continue to chase us in every mirror, reminding us that we all lost something of our humanity when we did not stop at her silent scream.

I owned houses and became a refugee in tents.

His voice was trembling, not only from the cold, but from a memory that was filled with desolation.

An old Palestinian man talks to the announcer, and behind him is a market full of people who have become like dust, moving in no direction, as if they are seeking life in the desert of oblivion.

Smiling with a smile soaked in sorrow, he said, "I used to own houses... And I became a refugee in tents."

It was a statement of a century of labyrinth, of displacement that never ended, of losses that were repeated until they became ordinary.

The wind passed through his white hair as tales passed over its ruins, and his veins in his neck were like olive roots that had not found a land to settle in. He was talking, as if talking was a way of survival, a way to convince himself that what had happened to him was real and not a long nightmare.

The reporter said to him in a tender voice: "How do you manage your affairs in life in tents?"

He replied with an eye oscillating between pride and brokenness: We are living in tents, what do we want to do?

Then he sighed, and added, as if God is talking to the camera: We have dressed up as all people... But we had houses.

Houses. A word he uttered as if he were calling out the names of his loved ones who had died. Houses whose "totalities in the earth are leveled," as he said, as if they had fallen once, not wall after wall, but a vertical fall from spirit to mud.

There was no anger in his voice, but a tired nostalgia. When the journalist asked him, "What are you doing, uncle?"

He smiled and said, "Myself?! Then he was silent for a while before adding: "I don't need to, I don't walk in the street feeling safe."

That sentence was a summary of all human beings when they were deprived of the axioms of life. He does not ask for a house, a wall, or even a blanket from the old "storehouses" as he described it.

He just wants to walk without fear, to have his shadow as his own, and not to hide from the sun, from the bombardment, or from the question.

He was talking about the lack of water and aid, about the coming cold, about a winter that was looming from afar and he couldn't find anyone to prepare for it.

Looking up at the gray sky, he said, "Winter is coming, and God knows what will happen to us."

He was predicting what he didn't want to see: children getting sick, old people shivering at night, tents shivering in the wind.

He didn't know that he was filming to publish his words on thousands of screens, nor did he realize that his sad eyes would become a mirror to the world that used to pass by the news of the passage of oblivion.

The people around him crowd the market, carrying the rest of life in weightless bags. And the old man alone stands as if he were the last grave witness of a collective memory, a memory that no longer memorizes the dates.

She only memorizes the number of tents, and the number of children who die silently in the cold. At that moment, when the microphones were raised to his mouth, he was like holding a witness to heaven. Every word he said was a stone in a ruined house, and a pulse of a homeland breathing among the rubble.

When he said, "We did not replace it with any need," "it" referred to houses, but it meant more than that: it meant safety, childhood, the smell of bread, and the sound of the call to prayer from a window that no longer existed.

He was not only recounting his tragedy... He was telling the story of an entire country that lived in tents, and every tent there bore the name of a village that was absent from the map.

In his eyes it was the shadow of a distant house in Jaffa, Majdal or Old Gaza, and in his voice was the sigh of a generation that had become so impatient that it had a taste of air. At the end of the meeting, when the microphones were silent, the man did not remain silent.

He stared into the void, as if he saw his home on the horizon, a house of light that would not be brought down by war.

The man who said, "I had houses and became a refugee in tents," was talking not only about himself, but about all those who carried their keys in their pockets, and about every land that was still waiting for their feet to come back alive.

Lebanese Writer