In the narrow streets of Gaza, where childhoods are carved out between bomb craters and silence, five-year-old Tala Abu Odeh once ran holding her father’s hand. That small comfort was torn from her when an Israeli airstrike changed the course of her life in an instant. The explosion shattered the air—and her body. When she awoke in a hospital, the world had changed. Her left hand was gone.

Tala’s eyes, too young to understand war, searched the room for something familiar. Instead, there was only confusion, pain, and a void she couldn't name. Since that day, she has stopped speaking to others, carrying her grief in silence, as if language itself had become too heavy to hold.

Her father, Yahya, tries to keep hope alive for her. He remembers a recent visit to a shelter where volunteers painted butterflies and flowers on the children’s hands, trying to breathe colour back into Gaza’s ashen landscape. Tala stretched out her one remaining hand, smiling faintly as a butterfly appeared. Then, raising the other arm, she asked with heartbreaking simplicity, “Where is my hand?”

There is no answer that could soften the truth. Yahya survives not only the bombing that maimed his daughter but now the slow, unrelenting sorrow of her question. He asks the world for help—not just for a prosthetic limb, but for a kind of healing no machine can offer. “She needs support to feel like a child again,” he says. “But how do I explain the cruelty of what happened to her?”

Tala is just one name among thousands. Gaza’s children, maimed, orphaned, or buried beneath rubble, bear the unbearable cost of a war that has lasted over 18 months. Over 30,000 children have been killed. More than 45,000 wounded. In Gaza, these are not numbers. They are dreams that will never grow old.

And Tala—quiet, wounded, still searching—carries a question that continues to echo across a devastated land.