While Israel's war of extermination on the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip continues for over its 11th month, Palestinian children surviving the onslaught are taking any opportunity to improve their mental health by playing, even if it may kill them.
The non-government organisations (NGOs) like Defence for Children International - Palestine and human rights organisations in the Gaza Strip warned that the Israeli army was "deliberately killing" Palestinian children while they were at play and practising their normal rights like all children around the world.
Tala Abu Ajwa, a ten-year-old Palestinian child from Gaza City, was among those children killed by Israeli forces.
On 3 September, Tala got her parents' approval to play with his friends and brothers just outside in the yard of her house in al-Shujaiya area of east Gaza City. She wanted to try out her roller-skating shoes.
It was only a few minutes later, the Israeli army fired a missile at a flat in her family's building, and a piece of shrapnel penetrated her neck, killing her instantly.
"Once I heard the explosion, I rushed to check what was happening. I was shocked when I saw my daughter lying on the ground and blood covered her body and her skating shoes," Hussam Abu Ajwa, her father, remarked to The New Arab.
"What hurts me the most is that the army killed my child and her blood splattered on her pink shoes that she loved so much," Abu Ajwa said.
"My daughter wanted to play and have fun like the rest of the children in the world. What was her fault that she was killed while playing?" the grieving father said, while holding his daughter's shoes.
Wiping out dreams
"Despite the tragic conditions we live in Gaza in light of the ongoing bombing and killing, my daughter kept playing with her friends in the hope of finding some happiness and forgetting the tragedies of war," he added.
A short video clip of Tala's lifeless body, wearing the skating shoes, spread widely and received some media coverage and sympathy from social media users around the world.
"I dreamed a lot that one day, I will publish a video of my daughter after she grew up and graduated from university to express my pride in her, but the Israeli army deprived us of dreams and that we might have of a better future," the father bitterly said.
Siham Hamada, a Palestinian from Gaza City, hoped to document the moments of her son's, Mohammed, graduation from the university too.
But the Israeli army killed her 12-year-old son in April in the Zeitoun neighbourhood in the south of Gaza City. He was with a group of his friends playing football and were hit by a targeted Israeli missile strike.
"We've fled death many times, and I protected my children throughout repeated displacement, but it seems that the army insists on killing our children and destroying our lives," she told TNA.
"Why all this silence that dominates the world? Why are our children killed without anyone supporting or protecting us? How long will the Israeli army continue to kill us in cold blood?" she asked.
The grieving mother shared her child's wish he had before his death. Mohammed wished that the war would end one day and that he would go back to his daily life, "but every time the Israeli army bombs near us, my child runs to me and tells me that he is afraid."
The mother also wishes that the war ended and "the killing of innocent people in Gaza would stop, as most of the victims are children, women and elderly people."
After a Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023, the Israeli army launched a large-scale genocidal war against the besieged coastal enclave, killing more than 41,000 Palestinians and wounding around 100,000, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
“Out of the total number of deaths, the Israeli army killed more than 16,000 children in Gaza,” the ministry noted.