“Saturday night in al–Mughayyir.”
Of killers and kindergartners.
16 AUGUST—Pale sunlight fills the yard beyond my windows, a breeze blows in through the screens. It carries a hint of autumn. I hear the sound of cars outside, all of them traveling too quickly along the road on which I live. I hear the sounds of laughter and children at play. These: The sights and sounds of an ordinary Saturday afternoon.
I begin this report in precisely this way to emphasize by contrast the fortunate normalcy of life when it is stable and peaceful against the utter abnormality and brutality of life lived under the Jewish state’s reign of terror.
I spent the first half of my Saturday afternoon contentedly reviewing budget and progress reports for a kindergarten playground in the village of al–Mughayyir. This project, as reported here, here, and here commenced in the fall of last year after a successful GoFundMe campaign.
Thanks to the generous donations of many readers of The Floutist and Winter Wheat, the fundraiser quickly reached its goal. When school begins in a few weeks, two classrooms full of five-year-olds will have a new playground and new play equipment for their modest kindergarten.
As I was texting with my project partners in the West Bank, finalizing the last dispersement of funds to pay for a new slide and merry-go-round, one of my colleagues sent a text announcing breaking news. The description was brief:
A martyr in al–Mughayyir.
The I.O.F. had just shot and killed someone in the village.
The following video records the moment when 18-year-old Hamdan Musa Abu Aliya was gunned down in a street in al–Mughayyir. He was unarmed and running and appears to have been shot in the back.
The shooting is recorded in the first second of the video as Abu Aliya runs down the street from right to left. The force of the shot throws his body forward. The terrible sound echoes through the village. We should witness this.
Shooting an unarmed teenager is never an act of self-defense. It’s target practice. It’s murder turned into perverse sport—killing as entertainment. It’s an act of naked sadism.
As reported to me, the I.O.F. soldiers responsible for this crime were almost certainly recently stationed in Gaza. These brigades are routinely cycled through the West Bank as a form of rest and relaxation—a break from committing genocide. And these soldiers, fresh from having perpetrated monstrous crimes against the people of Gaza, commit monstrous crimes against the Palestinian population of the West Bank. Palestine is not a state. It has no standing army. It’s population is entirely civilian.
Every five-year-old in the village of al–Mughayyir will have heard the shot that killed Hamdan Musa Abu Aliya. They will either be related to Abu Aliya, or they will know of him and his family. Some of them will be friends with his younger siblings.
These kindergartners will all know who killed Abu Aliya and how and why. Their parents will attempt to protect them, to focus their attention elsewhere, to keep them as safe and happy as possible. But they will know Abu Aliya was killed because he was Palestinian. And they will know that they too are targets.
Even so—because of this, indeed—the children of al–Mughayyir need to play and laugh and have moments in which they can be children.
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