At dawn on 7 October last year, my wife Haneen and I prayed al-Fajr and ate breakfast. We work as teachers, and we were preparing our baby Majd to stay with his grandmother during the work day. Then we heard the sounds of rockets and missiles being launched from Gaza at Israel.
I told myself this wasn’t usual, and that something big was happening for sure. Yet I reassured my wife that everything was fine – that perhaps the rockets signified an Israeli assassination of a Hamas or Islamic Jihad leader and would not lead to a wider escalation.
I then searched on the internet and learned that this was very different than anything we had experienced before. ….more
