On a late August afternoon in Gaza City, thirteen-year-old Ahmed Mohammed Abu Sakran stood frozen beside a small market stall, unable to move. A strike had ripped through the neighbourhood of Al-Rimal, killing his father instantly and leaving fragments of his body clinging to the boy’s shoulder. In that moment, childhood itself seemed to collapse under the weight of loss.

Ahmed recalls the heat of the blood, the smell of death, the silence that followed the blast. He tried to move away, but his body refused. “My father was beside me one second, gone the next,” he says quietly. “His flesh was on my shoulder, and I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t breathe.” The boy’s trembling frame carried not only the remnants of his father, but the burden of a life shattered.

His father had been his guide, smiling even through hunger, urging patience, teaching his son responsibility by keeping him at the stall that day. Those words,  “This is our livelihood, we must protect it”,  were the last Ahmed ever heard from him. Now, each sound of aircraft brings back the explosion, the rubble, the helplessness of standing alone in devastation.

Ahmed’s mother, Mariam, speaks of grief that words cannot hold. She remembers running to embrace her son after the strike, torn between relief that he was alive and despair that he had witnessed such horror. “When I saw him, I held him and cried endlessly,” she says. “I couldn’t protect him from the trauma, and my tears could not wash away the pain.”

Their home is filled with silence now, their days marked by absence. Ahmed tries to appear strong for his younger siblings, reassuring them that their father is watching over them. But the trauma lingers in his eyes, replaying the moment that divided his life in two. Mariam sees it each time he struggles to laugh or play, knowing that he is fighting to create fragments of life amid destruction.

The boy’s words remain simple, yet devastating: “I feel like a part of me died with his flesh on my shoulder.”