CREATIVE WRITING: By Amal Rostom
She was not asking for comfort, or classrooms with painted walls, or teachers who called her name in morning roll call.
All she wanted — in the moments before she burned — was to wake up to a morning without missiles, to nibble on the leftover bread from last night’s distribution, and to survive the day without anyone screaming, “Run, the fire is coming.”
In Gaza, schools become shelters, and shelters become tombs.
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And on this particular day, a school became an inferno.
Not from a candle, not from a faulty wire — but from a missile dropped by an aircraft that knew exactly what was inside: the displaced, the exhausted, the hungry, the frightened, the forgotten.
She was either sleeping when it hit, or maybe she was awake.
Maybe she saw the flame crawling up the wall.
Maybe she heard her mother’s voice cracking through the smoke.
Maybe she tried to run.
But the smoke got there first.
And the fire moved faster than her legs ever could.
Her full name was never confirmed.
Her face was never shown on international broadcasts.
No journalist mentioned her in nightly reports.
No NGO flashed her image on a slideshow in Geneva.
No resolution was drafted in her memory.
But she died.
Her body ignited,
her skin blistered,
her heat rose high enough to melt metal,
while the moral temperature of the world remained cold.
By the time they reached her,
there was only a black imprint on the wall —
the kind you see in forensic photos.
The kind that says:
Someone was here,
and then… was not.
She wasn’t a combatant.
She wasn’t a headline.
She was a girl.
Displaced with her mother.
Asleep on a school floor under a flickering light.
Dreaming, maybe, of a home.
Of a notebook.
Of a corner where she used to scribble her name in blue ink.
But she never made it back.
Her body was never recovered whole.
What remained was a scorched remnant,
and the smell that refused to leave the walls.
This is not a death report.
This is a report on the silence that followed.
This is not an isolated tragedy.
This is a documented crime.
And every hand that shook from calling it what it is… is complicit.
In the final moments, there was no one to lift her.
No angel.
No medic.
No camera.
No conscience.
She died alone,
surrounded by fire,
while the sky — they say it’s wide — only opened when she left the earth.
Amal Rostom is a content writer at the Palestinian Authority.
