The air is cooler today and Israeli troops entered Gaza in the early hours. This morning we awoke to unusually grey skies, a tribute at least, to these times.
There's a Scots expression which describes better than any I know, the Palestinian mood at the moment: 'hudden doon'. You feel it in each conversation and see it in every face on the street.
A photograph in yesterday's New York Times, showed a man holding the face of one of the four, slight bodies wrapped in yellow shrouds - the victims of Wednesday's horrific strike on Gaza beach.
Holding the face of a child between one's two hands is such a visceral action. Just looking at the image, I can feel our boys' warm cheeks between my palms, bright eyes looking back, warm breath on the inside of my wrist.
In a matter of seconds, out went four little lights on that beach. Their junior trajectories stopped in their tracks. Nothing to remain but the pain in the hearts of the mothers and fathers who know so well what it is to have a running, jumping, dancing, fighting, laughing ball of boy energy in their house. The feeling of that form of sculpted sinew and muscle wrapped in silken skin - so familiar to their hands from all the washing and dressing and tending and kissing. Never again will they grasp an arm in angry chastisment, stroke a head in illness, or grip with two arms around a breathless chest in response to a boyish hug. The basis of the pain must be the ghost of tangibility, the whisper of a memory of all those routine motions required from every parent. Every parent's darkest fear.
Family Bakr and all the other families in Gaza and the West Bank who have lost children since this horror was rekindled - 'nahass fikom' we are feeling it with you.
There's a Scots expression which describes better than any I know, the Palestinian mood at the moment: 'hudden doon'. You feel it in each conversation and see it in every face on the street.
A photograph in yesterday's New York Times, showed a man holding the face of one of the four, slight bodies wrapped in yellow shrouds - the victims of Wednesday's horrific strike on Gaza beach.
Holding the face of a child between one's two hands is such a visceral action. Just looking at the image, I can feel our boys' warm cheeks between my palms, bright eyes looking back, warm breath on the inside of my wrist.
In a matter of seconds, out went four little lights on that beach. Their junior trajectories stopped in their tracks. Nothing to remain but the pain in the hearts of the mothers and fathers who know so well what it is to have a running, jumping, dancing, fighting, laughing ball of boy energy in their house. The feeling of that form of sculpted sinew and muscle wrapped in silken skin - so familiar to their hands from all the washing and dressing and tending and kissing. Never again will they grasp an arm in angry chastisment, stroke a head in illness, or grip with two arms around a breathless chest in response to a boyish hug. The basis of the pain must be the ghost of tangibility, the whisper of a memory of all those routine motions required from every parent. Every parent's darkest fear.
Family Bakr and all the other families in Gaza and the West Bank who have lost children since this horror was rekindled - 'nahass fikom' we are feeling it with you.
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