This is an opinion article. The views expressed belong to the author.
A letter from a mother in Gaza to mothers around the world.
By Munira El Najjar: "To every mother who wakes her children with a kiss and sleeps peacefully to the sound of their laughter. To every mother who packs a schoolbag or waits by the window for her child to return. I write to you from a place that no longer resembles life."
Munira, I hear you loud and clear, from Luxembourg!
As you buy schoolbags, sharpen pencils and prepare your children for another school year, I ask you to pause for a moment. Think of the children for whom none of this is possible.
Sometimes it feels as though the world has decided that the genocide has stopped. As though Gaza has somehow become better. As though life has returned to normal. As though the killing, displacement, imprisonment and destruction have all stopped.
They have not.
While children around the world return to classrooms, children in Gaza have no schools to return to. Some are orphaned. Some have not held a schoolbook in years. Their childhood has been replaced by a trauma that adults can barely bear, let alone children.
There are mothers holding the clothes of their murdered children, breathing in their scent and trying to remember their smiles, their morning cuddles and the little things only a mother remembers.
Do not present us as numbers. We are not numbers. These are our children. Children who once had dreams.
Children like Hind Rajab and Mohammed Al-Durrah, children whose deaths became symbols of a reality the world has watched unfold, sometimes in front of cameras and sometimes away from them.
In Luxembourg, our children proudly compare the centimetres they have grown over the summer. In Gaza, a child may feel lucky simply to still have all their limbs and someone they love alive to care for them.
A term has emerged from this reality that should never have had to exist: WCNSF: Wounded Child With No Surviving Family.
Think about that. A wounded child with no family left to come to their bedside.
Why should any child have to experience this? Why should a mother have to bury her child? Why should parents have to identify their children's bodies beneath the rubble?
These children did not choose Gaza. They did not choose displacement or bombardment. They did not choose to lose their parents, siblings, homes and schools.
They were simply born. And they deserve the same chance to live, dream and grow as every other child.
Palestine does not yet have an Anne Frank museum. But why should humanity wait for one, or for tens of thousands of them?
Why do we wait until children are gone, their photographs framed and their stories written into history before we decide to care? Why can't we act while they are still alive?
Every parent should be asking these questions. Because this is not about choosing one child over another. It is about believing that every child matters.
The child preparing a schoolbag in Luxembourg matters. And the child sleeping tonight in a tent, a damaged home in Gaza or even an Israeli prison matters too.
Their childhood should not be worth less because of where they were born.
That is why, this Saturday, 12 September, we will fly kites for the children of Gaza as part of a global movement. A kite is simple: paper, sticks, string and wind.
For a child, it can mean freedom, imagination and joy. And yet, even a child's kite can become a source of fear and threat in a place where ordinary childhood has been turned into something dangerous.
So, Luxembourg, this is an invitation, not just to an event, but to a moment of solidarity.
Bring your kite. Bring it for the child who has no classroom to return to. For the child who has lost a parent. For the child who still dreams of what they will become.
Bring it because every child deserves the right to play.
Join us at 3pm at Hamilius on 12 September. Fly a kite for a child who should be alive to fly their own.
Not because a kite can rebuild a school. Not because it can end a genocide.
But because it can remind us of one simple truth: These are children. And they should be alive to be children.
So, to every mother preparing her child for school this September: Remember one more child.
A child in Gaza who should have been choosing a schoolbag too. A child who should have been worrying about homework. A child who should simply have been allowed to be a child.
We are buying school supplies. Gaza's children are counting what they have left.
We want accountability. We want justice.
And above all, we want the children of Palestine to have what every child deserves: the chance to live life as a kid.
