Phalapoem editor, 12/02/2025
(The night is heavy with smoke and sorrow. The Nur Shams refugee camp is in ruins—walls shattered, streets littered with rubble. Handala, the eternal 10-year-old with his back turned to the world, stands at the edge of the destruction. His small, bare feet are planted in the blood-streaked dirt. Beneath the dim flicker of a burning home, he watches over Sondos Shalabi, who lies on the cold ground, her hands cradling her belly—her unborn child no longer moving inside her.)
Sondos: (weakly, her voice barely above a whisper) Handala… you’ve been here all this time, haven’t you? Watching… waiting…
Handala: (his voice is quiet, but firm) I have never left. Not when they bulldozed homes in Jenin. Not when they filled the night with gunfire in Tulkarem. Not when they called our cries for freedom “terror.” I have always been here.
Sondos: Then you saw it? You saw how they opened fire on our car? How they didn’t even hesitate? My husband… he tried to shield me, but their bullets were precise. They always are. They don’t miss when it comes to us.
Handala: (nods, his fists clenched at his sides) They aim for the heart. The home. The future. They saw a mother carrying her child and decided she was a threat.
Sondos: (a tear slips down her cheek, mixing with the dust of her face) My baby… she was almost here, Handala. I had a name for her. Do you want to hear it?
Handala: (softly) Yes.
Sondos: Amal. It means “hope.” I thought maybe—maybe despite everything—she would know a Palestine with fewer ruins. Fewer funerals. Maybe she would hear laughter before gunfire. Maybe she would grow up and never have to see you.
Handala: (a deep silence hangs between them) She would have loved the olive trees. She would have danced in the streets of Nablus and hummed songs from her grandmother’s lips. But they knew her name, Sondos. Even before she was born. They always know our names before they erase them.
Sondos: (her breath is shallow, her fingers trembling against her stomach) They wouldn’t even let me fight for her, Handala. The doctors, the ambulances—they were kept away. Do you know what it feels like to know help is just down the road, but the soldiers won’t let them reach you? That my baby could have lived, but they chose for her to die?
Handala: I know. I have seen mothers scream at checkpoints, holding their bleeding children. I have seen fathers forced to kneel beside their sons’ bodies, unable to close their eyes. I have seen homes turned to ashes before the tea on the stove has time to go cold.
Sondos: (her eyes flutter shut, exhaustion taking hold) Will you remember her, Handala? Will you carry her name?
Handala: I will. I will whisper it in the ears of the wind. I will carve it into the stones of Jerusalem. I will press it into the soil of every grave they have made. And when Palestine is free, Amal’s name will be among the first to be sung.
(The sound of distant gunfire cuts through the night. Sondos’ body stills. The silence that follows is the kind that only war understands. Handala does not cry. He does not turn. He only stands, as he always has, bearing witness to another stolen life. He is a child who will never grow old, living in a land where children do not get the chance to.)