What Happens When Israel Bombs Your Child and Claims It “Missed”?
Part I: Someone Else’s Die.
July 2, 2025 -12:00 AM Istanbul (Gaza breathes in the same silence)
I am a mother in my waking life, but in my nightmares I am stripped of that title, pinned in sleep paralysis while my mind stays awake and my body will not move. I can hear life unfolding around me, yet I remain trapped in a terrible waking coma, where my brain is fully conscious and my limbs refuse to listen. It mirrors the trauma I still carry, the moment I watched my daughter bleed and gasp for breath while doctors told me her heart was failing.
Living with this condition for over a decade has forced me to train myself to recognize the onset and alert my partner to intervene if I fail to wake. We have only managed to medicate the syndrome rather than break it, but I have learned to breathe through the terror. In this episode, my deepest fears were projected into vivid reality, and this morning my eyes barely opened as I bolted from bed to find my child and make sure she was alive.
Her eyes looked sad and tired, staring at me as if she blamed me for every scream that had carved her heart open, echoing what it means when Israel bombed her crib while she was tiny, one year old kind of tiny.
In the nightmare, I swore with the sheer desperation of a mother who would murder the sky to protect her child that I would keep her safe, even though neither of us believed the promise. She certainly did not know how much I blamed myself for her pain.
Long before she was born, I specifically chose a room with only two windows to prevent shattered glass from hurting her. I knocked down the wall between our rooms to reach her faster during airstrikes. I found the deepest crib available, padded it thickly with pillows, and even hung a tiny umbrella over her head, clinging to the fragile illusion that I could somehow shield her from the devastation inevitably coming our way.
Her life was supposed to be as safe as a Palestinian child’s life could possibly be, yet the only truly secure existence for our children requires a world entirely free of missiles, apartheid, and a genocidal settler state that turns infants into targets. That profound safety demands that Palestine be liberated, not only from physical rubble, but from the very system that grinds our living bodies into dust, requiring us to finally secure our human rights and witness the complete dismantling of the Zionist state of Israel.
12:15 AM Istanbul (Gaza still bruised, still breathing)
When I toss and turn at night, I hear their words echoing like curses typed in all caps, demanding I blame Hamas, calling me names, wishing for me to burn in Gaza. I scroll past accounts featuring American and Israeli flags fused into their profile pictures alongside rifles or lions, with usernames like @IDFbeauty69 or @ZionistsWillWin. I imagine them in Tel Aviv, in uniform, scrolling through TikTok between uploads of Israeli occupation soldiers. I picture pink washing while rainbow flags are held up in front of Palestinian homes they have just flattened, and I picture them wearing the lingerie of the Palestinian women they displaced or killed across Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank, as if the body of the victim is just another costume.
Savage consistency is their defining talent, driven by a desire for death for all of us without any discrimination. They deliberately target men, women, and children alike, and their snipers shoot both heads and hearts with equal precision, systematically making martyrs of everyone in their path.
12:32 AM Istanbul (Gaza exhales, maybe for a second)
I stop writing to play one of those calming sleep stories that talks about forests and birds and perhaps a unicorn, offering a peace I remember tasting for just a second while the genocide crept over my shoulder. My therapist had warned me not to summon happiness, because my memory has fangs and tends to glitch by turning beauty into bait that drags me back under the surface. She told me joy becomes a deadly poison when grief is not yet finished with you, and she was right, yet I summoned it anyway.
I suddenly smelled grilled Arayes and heard the bright sound of my family’s laughter, the women in our kitchen commanding the space like generals of flavor and love. I never cooked when they were around because I bowed to their reign of spices, and together we fed our children, grandchildren, and neighbors, always ensuring there was extra food for the neighbors without fail.
In our mostly Christian community, we would recite ayat from the Qur’an and match them to verses in the Bible, both agreeing that if your neighbors can smell your food, you must share it, because you cannot sleep while someone else is dreaming of your meal.
1:04 AM Istanbul (Gaza pulsing like an open wound)
Then a message arrived to tell me they had bombed near our church, reporting that twenty-three members of the Abu Samra family were killed by Israeli missiles.
I freeze completely, unable to move, while my heart beats frantically and my limbs refuse to listen. I stay suspended in a space between waking and real, and brutal honesty floats in like mold across my waterline as I type to my beloved friend that I cannot do anything to help them, hit send, and then stare at the screen as if a stranger has taken over my body. I question what I said and how I could possibly say it. I realize that while I used to offer comfort, I now offer silence, or worse, the unvarnished truth.
Your daughter was beautiful. I'm so sorry, sister.
Free Palestine 🇵🇸
Death, death to the IDF 🎵