2:18 AM @eid_yara This is little Yara. This picture was taken in my home at Al Bureij camp where I lived for the first 16 years of my life. I don’t remember much about my childhood. My mother used to get upset about that. Later we discovered that partial memory loss is a trauma response. I only have one brother Feras who’s 3 years younger than me and we were inseparable growing up. We played together, ate together, fought each other and were literally never apart. In 2008, I was 8, Feras was 5 and we lived through our first aggression together. I remember that we were terrified of white phosphorus and how it will melt our skin. We were sleeping in the corridor of our home on the floor, both shaking with the sounds of bombs with our parents holding us. 2012 was a blur, I actually can’t remember anything about that aggression. Just fear and no details. Just bombs and screams. At 14 I understood what death meant, I saw people turn into body parts in front of my eyes, we survived a massacre. I dropped out of school and entered the hospital for a month. I decided to leave after that immediately. I decided that I need to do something because I survived and so many people I know didn’t. In 2016, I traveled to the UK to study with barely any English. I couldn’t go back home for 6 years nor see my family. In 2021, another aggression in Gaza, my family survives by a miracle. Two months later, I go back to Gaza for the first time. Six months later, I lose my father. 2022, I work as a journalist and cover the assault on Gaza. 2023, I graduate from university hoping to go back home in few years. Three months later, a genocide starts in my home. I lose my best friend, more than 60 members of my family, and my mentor. I lose both my childhood home and the house we moved to after I went back to Gaza. I never wanted to leave Palestine. I never wanted to study politics, I never wanted to become a journalist. All I wanted was to have an ordinary childhood and an ordinary life. All I wanted was to be around my family and friends in our home in Palestine. All I wanted was to simply live in dignity and in a Free Palestine. All Palestinian children want the same thing. 
