Roller-skating girl with ‘lots of dreams’ killed in Gaza strike

GAZA CITY: At first Hussam Salah Abu Ajwa resisted letting his daughter out to play, but finally he relented so she could zip around on her pink skates near their Gaza City home.
Within two minutes he heard the boom of a strike that made the girl, 10-year-old Tala Abu Ajwa, the latest child fatality in the ongoing war in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands.
“She begged me and said, ‘Please, Daddy, let me go out’. I felt sad because she wanted to play with the girls” in the neighborhood, Hussam told AFP after the strike on Tuesday.
Upon hearing the blast he raced outside, but “when I reached the flat that had been bombed, I found her among the rubble,” he said.
“I recognized her by her roller skates, the only thing that was visible.”
Details of the strike were unclear.
A photograph of Tala has since circulated widely on social media, the skates with white velcro straps and pink wheels sticking out from underneath a white cloth covering her dead body.
Mass wartime displacement and destruction of schools have deprived children across the Gaza Strip of chances for recreation.
More than 70 percent of schools operated by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, have been destroyed or damaged, agency chief Philippe Lazzarini said on X this week.
“The longer children stay out of school, the higher the risk of a lost generation, fueling resentment & extremism,” Lazzarini said.
“With no ceasefire, children are likely to fall prey to exploitation including child labor and recruitment into armed groups.”
For Tala, the problem was more basic: she simply did not like being cooped up indoors all the time, Hussam said.
“She was cheerful and always liked to laugh, and loved to get out of the house,” he said.
“She had lots of dreams. She was always asking me for lots of things and I responded to her requests. She told me. ‘I want a pair of skates’, so I brought them for her.”
The war in Gaza was triggered by Hamas’s attack on southern Israel on October 7 which resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians and including hostages killed in captivity, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Of 251 hostages seized by Palestinian militants during the attack, 97 remain in Gaza including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign against Hamas has killed at least 40,878 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.
Now that Tala is gone, her parents and brothers are left to marvel at their bad luck, with the strike landing during one of the rare occasions Hussam let one of his children go outside.
“She used to say to me, ‘Why don’t we live like all the other children in the world? I wish we could live a peaceful life. We don’t want wars, Mum. I’ve had enough of wars’,” her mother, Umm Tala, recalled.
“She was one of the best pupils and she excelled, she was very intelligent. She used to say to me: ‘I’d like to be able to go to the park and play.’ She’s dead and so are her wishes.”