Dear mum, my phone was destroyed in the blast, so I was not able to contact you. I feel so dumb for not memorizing the phone number of my own mother. You will shake your head and curse generation Z again.

I don’t know if you are alive and I don’t know if you would return to our apartment if you were. Your entire life was between these walls, so I reckon you will. Am assuming you will have run into neighbours and you have already heard the news. Taleen and Sami did not make it out alive. If it’s any comfort am sure both never saw it coming and passed on to a better world instantaneously. I should also stress that the last night they went to bed, they did so with full bellies. It was the last day me and Fares managed to take the boat out to fish. The zionists shoot at any boat now, no matter how small. They didn’t suffer and they had a decent last meal. I know you will suspect am only saying this to dimish your grief, but it’s the truth. And maybe am making things far worse by telling you all this. I feel their spirit around me every day and I know that wherever they are they are helping me stay safe. Like the other day a sudden allergic reaction made me sneeze like twenty times in a row and it made me stop in the street. If I had continued walking I’d be dead now, because a building was struck less than 20 yards ahead of me. A woman’s shoe landed in front of me. It had a foot in it. Without thinking I picked it up intending to bring it to someone, I don’t know who, until I realized I had someone’s foot in my hands and I dropped it and started vomitting. Only some transparent slime came up. It burned my throat. This explosion didn’t injure me.

When our home got hit I had a few broken ribs and a metal rod, probably from one of the window casings, pierced my left shoulder like an arrow, but nothing vital was hit and it now only hurts if I put my arm behind my back, stretch or try to lift something over my head. Most things I can do without any pain. I refused pain killers, because there are so many cases that are worse off. To be burned is always the worst, but you know that in Gaza there was no proper treatment for burn victims even before the healthcare system was driven to collapse. Sorry, am rambling. You know how I start rambling the more tired I am. Apart from being tired am fine though.

Am afraid to tell you where am going, because you never know who finds this note. But I will be as safe as is reasonable to expect. I swear to you I will name my first born children Taleen and Sami and I will tell them all about them. Every possible detail. Like how Taleen preferred to eat dry cereals with no milk and how Sami wandered off one day when he was 3 and an old man brought him back , carrying him in his neck, and Sami pointed at the man and said: ‘I got me a donkey at market. He good donkey.’

This is where the note ends. In a different handwriting is added: ‘Hello baby, we came to finish the job of our airforce.’

Instead of the note, the young man was taped to the fridge, and the note slammed into his chest with what looked like those hooks you use to fix a tent to the ground. Cause of death was blunt force to the head. The butt of a gun most likely.

The mother, after finding her son in the bombed out kitchen, has adopted an orphaned girl. The girl is maybe 3, maybe 4, and only repeats the words: ‘Cover your head, my greatest treasure, cover your head, daddy loves you.’

She wishes she could tell the girl about her parents, but she doesn’t know any details, except that the father was a skilled engineer, but made a modest living as a website designer. Not something the girl can picture. Probably best not to make her think of her parents. The girl only survived because she was found under a huge pile of old phone books in an expensive oak wood chest with holes drilled all over the sides. At the hospital they said it was the cleverest improvized shelter they had found at a blast scene. Too bad it had only been large enough for the girl.

The mother regretted not having died in the blast at her own apartment, but she tried to find comfort in the idea that God had decided she had to find this orphan and raise her. Perhaps some great result was supposed to come from her caring for the girl.

Every second of every second she felt her heart cracking open to convert the longing for her own three children into loving dedication to only this one girl. The girl will have 30 grandchildren and every single grandchild will be a stinging defeat for the Israeli ‘only when murdering do I not feel weak and fragile’ cult.

On the back of her son’s note she has written:

‘I could be sad and shattered for losing you or I can rejoice for having been so unbelievably blessed with your presence in my life for 17 years. I choose the latter.’