You may think there’s nothing worse than seeing your house, your haven since you were a child, reduced to rubble overnight. But what’s worse than that is when those very stones — the ones your father lovingly put in place to create that warm and cozy home — come crashing down on his body, tearing him to pieces and splattered with his blood.

Those walls you considered your support and refuge, which protected you, have let you down — your family killed without pity, leaving you lost and alone. You try to retrieve their bodies from the rubble, but you cannot. How could you, when your home now smells of death and you could be targeted at any moment? So you leave your family under the wreckage, your heart broken and burning with hatred for whoever took their lives.

This is what happened to my friend Asmaa.

Asmaa’s story

Last year on Oct. 10, while I was at my husband’s house in Deir al-Balah breastfeeding my child, trying to calm him down, I heard the sound of a large missile exploding near me and thought for a moment I had died. In shock, I quickly ran out to investigate.

My family home had been two stories, but it was turned to dust in the blink of an eye, and beneath it were the bodies of my loved ones, cut into pieces like slabs of meat at a butcher shop. Some of them flew into the air from the force of the explosion, their bodies falling hard to the ground while their souls moved to heaven.

My sisters and brothers, my grandmother and grandfather, my uncle, his wife and his children were all martyred and have remained under the rubble for more than 10 months. Some of their neighbors were killed, too. In total, that blast killed 24 people.

My mother was the only survivor. God chose to grant her a lifeline, and perhaps our house took pity on her because she took care of it and cleaned it every day. She was sitting upstairs with my father when suddenly, she felt herself flying and falling on the roof of a neighboring building. She survived, but she was seriously injured, with bones broken in her skull and neck.

In that moment, the house where I grew up — in which I had beautiful memories — turned into a mass grave, smelling of blood and corpses. All that’s left is my mother and me, trying to give each other some comfort.

My face has turned pale and sad, my body emaciated, as I’m no longer able to eat and breastfeed my child as before. I long for my husband to relieve me a little, but he traveled shortly before the war began and has been unable to return.

Days have passed and I have become accustomed to visiting the graves of my family under the rubble, reciting the Qur’an to pray for their souls.

Mahmoud’s story

Once, while I was out walking, I found a child collecting the stones of our house, breaking them, and arranging them with care. He was singing of a lost childhood:

I am a child with something to say
Please listen to me
I am a child who wants to play
Why don’t you let me
My doors are waiting
My friends are praying
Small hearts are begging
Give us a chance
Give us a chance
Give us a chance
Give us a chance
Please! Please! Give us a chance!

Mahmoud told me his story: how he wakes up each morning to collect stones from bombed houses, breaking them into fine crumbs and using them to build slabs for the graves of martyrs.

This is difficult work for a 14-year-old, and it has inflicted many injuries on him, but Mahmoud does it anyway, hoping to earn a few shekels with which to buy food for his family on Fridays.

I do not see him as an ordinary child, but rather a superhero. Other children his age in other countries are having fun and living their childhood, while this child takes on responsibilities beyond his age, working beyond the capacity of his small body to be of assistance to his family and provide for them.

As for Mahmoud’s father, the occupation killed him. As he was leaving his home, a plane targeted him directly, scattering his body across the ground.

“My father taught me this work, and I wanted to make him proud of me, so I decided to build the slabs of his grave myself,” Mahmoud says.

Only his mother and younger siblings are left, and he has become responsible for them. So many worries accumulated in his little heart; this child has grown old even before he has matured. The occupation robbed him of his right to childhood, just as it robbed the rest of the innocent, helpless children of Gaza.

My child’s story

I think about my child. Will he have experiences similar to Mahmoud’s? Will he grow up amid destruction and annihilation? A child is supposed to grow up in a safe environment with his family, but in Gaza this is impossible.

Death threatens us every day and steals our loved ones, one after the other, and there is no escape from it; it could happen to us at any moment. We have committed no crime; we were born here, and we have no other home.

My child wakes up to the sounds of missiles and bombs and goes to sleep to the smells of blood and gunpowder. He cries every day, his heart pounding with fear that this brutal world will harm him.

A mother’s warm embrace is no longer a safe place for our children, and my tender kisses have lost their power to soothe. How many mothers were martyred while trying to protect their child, and how many pregnant women were brutally killed while doctors struggled to deliver their babies, orphaned even before they were born?

This article is co-published with Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.