School started this week in Gaza. Israel allowed 8-year-old Wafaa Akila to attend class for one day before killing her and her father.
It’s a cruelty that’s hard to comprehend. Two photos shared online are gutting: The first shows Wafaa in her blue uniform giving a thumbs up, happy to be going to school – a brief escape from the genocide that defined her childhood. The second shows her school books in the mangled vehicle in which she was killed.
It was another week defined by Israel’s killing of kids. On the same day Wafaa was murdered, Israel killed another child, Saadi Ghalia, while he slept in a school serving as a shelter for forcibly displaced people. About three days later, Israel killed a mother and father, and their two young daughters, while they too slept.
Meanwhile, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published two bombshell reports on Gaza.
Here’s more on all of that and other stories from another troubling week in Palestine: