Shalom to you, anonymous Palestinian girl.
I don't know your name. I'm almost certain that as I was writing this letter to you on July 15, you were no longer alive. The night of July 12, I received a photo of you. In fact, it was a long series of photos, which, sadly, arrived to my cell phone via WhatsApp. As someone who's lived in the Middle East for half a century and has been through several wars, I'm used to seeing gruesome photos. That's part of our life here. But yours was different. One photo that is worth 1,000 missiles. I looked at it, mesmerized by the human suffering unfolding before my eyes. Eventually I ended up deleting it from my mobile phone. I tried to forget and delete your photo from my own memory. I couldn't. That night, I barely slept a wink. The image of you lying on the operating table in a hospital in Gaza gave me no respite.
