by Kawther Salam
Have you ever studied in a tent during the cold winter? Have you ever studied in a tent over the rubble of your school? Have you ever lost your books in the demolition of your house and school? Have you ever burnt the books about “human right” as a protest against the continuous violations of your rights? Have you ever seen your mother, father, or both of them, burning before your eyes? Have you ever hanged among the dead parents and the lovely family in the corner of the rubble of your house? Have you ever smelled the burning bodies of your loved ones, family, friends other human beings? Have you ever seen or smelled, or worse, been burnt, by phosphor bombs? Have you lost your loved ones, your toys and Barbie dolls, your childhood, and still kept relaxed and quiet?
Have you ever slept without food or a tooth brush in a city of ghosts? Have you ever slept in the dark and urinated in your clothes of horror and scare? Did you ever swim in a pool of blood, or seen your bed colored red with the blood of your sister? Have you ever filled your drawing paper with dead people and war machines? Have you heard or seen drones and Apache helicopters every day of your live? Have you lived a childhood without hope and without dreams? Have you, have you … hundreds, thousand, millions of questions …
The children of Gaza experienced all these horrific images and crimes. These children will never recover of their awful trauma until the last day of their lives. These children are not terrorists. Nobody is born a terrorists, but the terror which they lived, what they saw, has turned their lives, hopes and dreams into revenge and resistance. The oh so righteous foreign ministers of the EU, their chief of foreign relations who condemned Hamas for acting “like a terrorist movement”, and accused them of bearing “overwhelming” responsibility for the devastation caused by Israel in Gaza during three weeks of massacre against the civilian population there.
The UN, Europe, and the all the international aid will not heal the deep psychological trauma of the Gazan children. The war machine will never bring peace and security. The State of Israel created a generation of hate and revenge, and the Israeli propaganda of terror is failed. The clear face of Israel as a criminal and terrorist State of terror, a habitual perpetrator of crimes against humanity has been exposed widely and for everybody to see, due to the horrible images which keep coming out of Gaza.
In Gaza, over the rubble of the Israeli destruction, as a symbolic step to express their deep anger due the increased violation of the rights of children due the continuous Israeli war crimes, dozens of Palestinian students sat in front of their destroyed school, the Al-Fakhurah school in the Jabalia refugee camp. Before a group of students, parents and journalists, they burnt the copies of the “Human Rights” book which they had received in the school. The burning of human rights books by the Palestinian students in Gaza is a clear message to the International community - your human rights and international treaties have been lost and were violated between the sound of Israeli bombs which destroyed schools, civic centers and mosques, and the various other sources of social development.
At the Al-Fakhurah UN school, over 45 Palestinian civilians were murdered and hundreds were injured in a horrific massacre after the Israeli war criminals bombed the school using artillery and missiles. The school was occupied by thousands of civilians refugees who left their homes, which the army of the criminal State of Israeli destroyed and razed to the ground. In Gaza, six schools were damaged and dozens of other schools were partially damaged by Israeli shelling and bombing.
On the second day of return of regular study in the Gaza schools, the students began to express their thoughts and feelings by drawings what they saw, heard, and smelled during the devastating war crimes operation of Israel. The images of destruction, the devastation and the bodies ripped into small parts, the blood that flowed everywhere, the aircraft, tanks, and the occupation, continued to occupy the thoughts and imagination of the students. The Ministry of Education decided to limit the lessons of the first week after the massacre to the activities of free drawing, sports and psychological rehabilitation in an attempt to lead the students thoughts away from the tragedies of the massacre which lasted 23 days and murdered 1350 and injured over 5000, in addition to the demolition of thousands of homes, industrial and commercial facilities, and the displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens who were left without a home.
Lama Samir, a young girl studying at the primary school of Al-Shojaeya in the Gaza Strip expressed her deep psychological suffering by drawing a picture of an Israeli tank shell hitting house. She draws a child swimming in a red pool of blood.
The child Ammar Al-Jundi, age of eight, who lives in “Izbat Abed Rabbo”, which was razed to the ground by the Israeli war machine, expressed his feeling by saying that he wished to become a resistance fighter in order to take revenge against all those who destroyed his house and killed the many people in his school.
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