Khaled Jabr Al-Khawaja, the beautiful child I watched grow, was shy, lovely, and cheerful. His smile was unique and different. Amaal, Khaled’s mother, is my mother’s friend and co-worker. There was some distance between our homes, but we would get together from time to time, and this is how I got to know him so well.

Amaal always liked to bring Khaled with her when visiting us, and she loved for me, my brother, and Khaled to play together. I love playing with children, and I especially loved playing with Khaled! Despite his strong attachment to his mother and his charming shyness, he would happily run to bring the football or coloring crayons, and we could take him a bit away from his mother to talk, play, or run around. As a photographer, I loved taking pictures of Khaled.

As an older youth, I often looked after him. Every time I saw Khaled, I felt a tremendous positive energy and happiness because he was indeed a special child. My own experiences as a child were quite different; I was more outgoing and independent, so Khaled’s gentle and reserved nature brought a refreshing contrast to my memories.

Before I left Gaza in 2018, I saw Khaled on his birthday in July. We were also celebrating my brother’s and my graduation from high school, making it a beautiful and emotional joint party.

I had the chance, after years being abroad, to visit Gaza in the summer of 2022, and I was very fortunate to see Amaal and Khaled at the university graduation ceremony for our common friends. I noticed that his attachment to his mother was as strong as ever. He never missed a chance to hang on to her for dear life, like a baby monkey, both intrigued by and a little scared of the world. We sat together at the same table and Khaled was smiling the whole time. I don’t recall ever seeing Khaled sad or crying; he was always loved, laughing, and wonderfully shy.

A child of Gaza

One of the beautiful gifts of life is children. Having children around, whether you know them or not, brings joy, happiness, and energy to any place. Children are pure and innocent beings, and their family and environment play a crucial role in shaping their character.

In Gaza, however, children are truly different; they are like adults in the form of children. Under the conditions of war and siege and occupation, children have to grow up fast and know things no child should have to know. The frequent wars and escalations have forced children to distinguish between the sounds of an artillery shell, a drone, or a fighter jet. The fear they experience during wars is the worst thing that can afflict their families. Families always wish for their children to be safe, loved, and protected, especially in response to the fears they experience.

Khaled came into the world in 2017 under extremely challenging circumstances. After getting married, Amaal waited five years to conceive beautiful twins through IVF; she endured seven surgeries during her pregnancy to keep the fetuses safe. Her delivery was extremely difficult; she stayed in the emergency room for hours, and her delivery was postponed due to a lack of incubators in Gaza caused by hospital equipment shortages linked to the Israeli occupation. Her condition was so critical that her womb could have ruptured at any moment.

She gave birth to the twins, Adam and Khaled. Tragically, due to the poor quality of the incubators, Adam did not survive, leaving only Khaled, whose condition was also critical. Khaled was transferred to a hospital in Jerusalem, where he stayed for about a month and a half for treatment. He was born weighing only 1.5 kilograms (a little over three pounds).

Amaal devoted her entire life to raising Khaled, balancing her job and home while giving all her love to him. Her whole life was Khaled, her only child.

Despite living in Gaza, she tried to give Khaled a better life. His time was always filled with activities from the moment he was born. Amaal enrolled him in a British school in Gaza City and signed him up for swimming, horse riding, and football training. We affectionately called him “Mo Salah” because his curly hair resembled that of the Egyptian Liverpool football player Mohamed Salah.

Amaal said one of the reasons she decided not to have another child was because she knew how difficult it was to maintain a child’s safety in Gaza. She wanted to focus all her attention and love on Khaled and help him achieve all his dreams. In school, Khaled learned about weather and different species of animals. One of his dreams was to see snow and various fish in person.

Before the war, Amaal took Khaled to Egypt to visit Ski Cairo, a resort and snow park in a commercial center, and also to Turkey to visit aquariums and learn about marine life. Khaled was very happy with these trips, feeling like he had touched the sky by seeing in real life what he learned in school, something unavailable in Gaza.

The war comes

On October 7, when the genocide in Gaza began, Amaal and Khaled were living in Gaza City. They moved to her family’s home in Rafah during the early days of the war when Israeli forces threatened everyone to move south or be bombed. They stayed with her parents, siblings, their spouses, and their children. Despite the harsh conditions, the warmth of the family provided some sense of safety.

After Amaal and Khaled moved south, the Israeli occupation bombed Amaal’s apartment in Gaza City, her workplace, and Khaled’s school, killing the horse Khaled loved, Shams. Khaled’s doctor was also killed in a strike on Al-Awda Hospital. Despite the Israeli occupation’s claim that southern Wadi Gaza was safe, the area was continuously bombed.

Amaal couldn’t escape the Gaza Strip with Khaled, as death came faster. On October 17, the Israeli occupation bombed the house they were staying in without warning. Amaal was the first to be pulled from the rubble, bleeding heavily but conscious. Because she survived, she initially believed that everyone, including Khaled, was also alive. However, upon reaching the hospital, she learned Khaled was still under the rubble. After being released from the hospital, she spent the entire night at the wreckage site, calling out for Khaled, convinced he was alive.

After 24 hours, they found Khaled’s body. He had been martyred at seven years old, along with 12 family members, including her father, brother, brother’s wife, and their children.

Amaal shared some of her story with me. “I deprived myself of many things, travel, and outings just to keep Khaled healthy because his immunity was weak at first,” she told me. “Just as I was starting to be happy with Khaled, I found he had passed away.”

Amaal survived physically but lost her soul and life. Her only, beautiful, remarkable son Khaled, a child who had committed no crime other than being from Gaza, was killed while sleeping at home. His body remained under the rubble for a day before being found and buried. For two days, we hoped for a miracle that Khaled might have survived because we knew how spiritually connected he and Amaal were. I can only image that to lose a child is to lose one’s spirit. To become a lifeless body waiting for burial.

Khaled is now in heaven, happy and at peace, cursing the silent world for this genocide. Khaled is one of many innocent children whose dreams and love were killed by a single missile, bullet, or shell; causing us, the living, to die a hundred times every second without them.