Chana Joffe-Walt

You do?

I was never sure what motivated Banyas to want to talk to me. She seemed to like telling me about her day, practicing her English. She had an ongoing fascination with the time difference between us. She always wanted to check in on that.

It's the afternoon. It's just... Afternoon? Mm-hmm. We're in the middle of the night. She'd call when she felt annoyed that Donna got to be the teacher that day, yet again.

And she'd call when she was bored. She'd call because I was an adult who would pay attention to her. Banias had to create activity, interest, out of such little material. Sometimes I got the impression I was there to help with that. Like one night, she was on the phone with me, and another phone rang. And like a character in a play, she went, Oh, look, the phone is ringing.

You're pretty funny, Banyas.

You are funny. Yes.

So Banyas had her own reasons to call me. When I called her, it was for different reasons. I'd call her because I'd read about a bombing campaign or fighting near where she was. Was she okay? And what was she thinking about all the violence around her? What is this like for an eight-year-old? In the middle of the summer, there was a series of intense airstrikes near Bañas.

I was curious if she'd heard them or seen them, but I also wanted to follow her lead and what she wanted to talk about. Do you have some time to talk?

Great.

Yeah, I've been reading in the news that there's been a lot of bombing.

Okay, I thought, here it is. She's about to tell me something big about what it's like to be a kid playing hide-and-seek with bombs going off nearby. Banyas told me, so we were playing, and we ran to the backyard.

That's it. That's her whole story. The strange thing that happened when they ran outside is they saw insects. A kind of insect they'd never seen before. Not the bombing. Bugs. Children are not known for their sense of scale or the longevity of their attention. And maybe it wasn't surprising that pretty much every time I asked about the war, Banias didn't really want to engage.

She didn't exactly ignore me, but it didn't seem to be the main thing she was thinking about. Like when an airstrike broke the windows in her house, she wanted to tell me about a prank she played on Dana. In mid-August, when ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas seemed to be unraveling yet again, and all the adults I was talking to in Gaza were deeply dispirited, here was Banias.

You do? Why do you think that?

Why? What gives you that idea? Mom and Dad tell me. I heard that yawn, noting it. Discussion of the war, over. There was one moment when Begnaz was forced to engage. She couldn't avoid it. Banias' family had been sheltering in Derbella for almost a year, when suddenly at the end of August, they got an evacuation order.

Israel posted a map on social media designating certain blocks in Derbella unsafe. And I saw that Maram, Banias' mother, had written something for Al Jazeera about the order. I'd hardly spoken to Maram for months, but I'd followed her reporting on bombings and food shortages. This article, though, was personal. She wrote about her confusion about what to do next.

"'I've never felt so worthless as a human being,' she wrote." A single Facebook post from an Israeli military spokesperson can upend our lives in an instant. Have you ever felt like a toy, being played with left and right, east and west, pushed from one place to another, south to Khan Yunis, out of Rafah, back to Khan Yunis, then to Nusayrat, only to be driven out again?

People are literally running through the streets like mad, clutching what little they have left. We have nothing left. Our hearts are broken and our minds are frayed. I look around at the few possessions I've managed to gather over the past 10 months.

A stove, cups, plates, pots, winter clothes, summer clothes, mattresses, blankets, batteries, light bulbs, big bottles of drinking water, tubs to wash clothes in. If I leave everything, there's no way to replace it. There are no markets, no supplies, no money to spare. We're running and running aimlessly. People screaming, suffering, and dying while the world watches. End quote.

And then, my phone rang. Hello?