Celebrating a martyr’s birthday in Gaza

On the morning of September 4, my eight-year-old niece Joody woke up bright-eyed and excited and suggested we celebrate her father’s birthday. It had been 25 days since we lost her father Moataz Rajab in the massacre the Israeli army carried out at the al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City. He was one of more than 100 civilian victims who had sought shelter at the school along with his family.

While Joody knew her baba was gone, it was clear she was trying to process a date in the calendar that had always been special to her and her siblings.

As the family – including my sister, Joody’s mom – was still very much in mourning, no one knew for sure how to manage the situation. We exchanged glances, hoping one of us would step in and handle the matter.

Everyone deals with shock differently, and each of us knew this was Joody’s way of coping with her father’s death.

Her grandparents gave her a hug and a kiss on her forehead and tried explaining that it is awkward to celebrate the birthday of someone who has passed away so recently. Other members of the family also told her it would be odd to sing a birthday song for someone who is sadly no longer among us. There was also no birthday cake to be found; bakeries in Gaza were struggling to make bread let alone produce such “luxury” items.

We knew the best way to handle this was not to get emotional, but be calm and try to reason with Joody.

Disappointed, my niece nodded her head in agreement and went about her day. But an hour later, she came back running to her mother with a counterproposal. “What if we celebrate baba’s birthday not by singing him a birthday song, but instead by reading the Quran?” a determined Joody asked.

We find refuge in the Quran in good times and in bad times, 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 some flour and was willing to bake seven pieces of a cake for the 14 of us.

A few hours later, we gathered in what was left of our home in the Shujayea neighbourhood. We sat down in a circle between walls strewn with bullet holes, damaged by artillery tank shells, and decorated with the drawings the children had made since the start of the war.

Joody began by reading Al-Fatihah, or the opening chapter of the Quran, standing under the damaged roof her grandfather had patched up with metal sheets to make our home a bit more habitable. As she recited the verses, both her mother and grandmother wept while everyone else sat solemnly, each of us trying hard to manage the profound feeling of loss.

As she read the verses aloud, I thought about the toll this war has taken on children. The Israeli army has killed more than 17,000 children, including more than 700 newborns. It has injured tens of thousands, including an estimated 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.

Time heals all wounds, they say, but how do we, the adults around her, hold her hand and get her past the enormity of pain she feels while a genocide is still unfolding around us? How do we help children like her cope with psychological trauma that keeps growing with every Israeli air strike, every family massacred, every mama or baba lost?

Hundreds of thousands of childhoods have been stolen as Gaza’s children have been forced from their homes into lives of misery, with no education, no proper shelter and no feeling of safety. They roam streets filled with rubble, garbage 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 worried about ship container traffic in the Red Sea than the lives of 41,000 human beings.

But hopelessness is not part of the vocabulary of the Palestinian people. Resilience is.

After Joody finished reading the Quran, we took out the cake. Being so generous just like her father, she had insisted on paying the exorbitant price for it with her own savings.

We savoured each bite of the cake to make it last as long as we could – just as we cherished our memories of Moataz. Looking at Joody, I realised he lives on in the kind and bright children he left behind.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.