In a corner among the rubble, a little girl sat clutching her worn-out doll, the one that had never left her side since she began to understand the meaning of things. Her eyes were filled with tears, and her weary small face told a story she was never meant to be the heroine of. The walls of her home no longer sheltered her; they had crumbled into scattered debris under the assault, and with them, the simple details of her childhood collapsed too.

The doll in her arms seemed like the last remnant of her old world; a world where her laughter was louder than the sounds of shelling. But now, she heard nothing but the echo of her sobs and the whistle of the wind stirring up the dust. She hugged her toy tightly, as if trying to retrieve through it the safety and peace the war had stolen.

Hunger and Anguish

Her small belly screamed with hunger, the pain gnawed at her frail body, and the growls of her stomach rose like yet another omen of the harsh reality. She found nothing to ease her hunger but patience, and nothing left to her but tears streaming silently down her dust-stained cheeks.

She knew, despite her innocence, that the world had ignored her hunger just as it ignored her land’s pain. With every sigh of sorrow, she recalled the images of her toys buried beneath the rubble. She remembered how she used to line them up side by side, laughing as she spoke to them as if they were her friends. But now they had become part of the past, a past erased beneath the feet of aggression, leaving behind only an empty space filled with pain and deprivation.

And there, in the midst of this devastation, the girl stood as a symbol of all innocence crucified upon the wall of war. She asked for nothing but a small home to restore her sense of safety, a meal to quiet the cries of her stomach, and a few toys to fill her days with laughter instead of tears. Her image, clinging to her tattered doll, was a silent message to the world: an entire childhood is being slaughtered in broad daylight.