It is late evening in Jerusalem. Me and photographer Felix Larnö are back at the hotel and I’m sitting in the room’s striped armchair and talking in a video call with my 7-year-old daughter about her lost tooth. She has long arguments about whether the tooth fairy behaved or not.
These are the kinds of things children should have to worry about.
At the same time, my phone rings. It is a message from a woman who was close to being killed during the bloody attack by Hamas last Saturday. Her 12-year-old son had seen on social media that many Israelis had been taken hostage by Hamas. When he couldn’t make contact with his mother, he was sure she was one of them: “He knew something was wrong, but he didn’t know what.”
“Take care. May we meet again”
Even now, when he knows she’s okay, he doesn’t dare believe it. A chronic fear that he will have to live with. Nevertheless, she writes in conclusion: “Take care of yourself. May we meet again, but this time in peace”.
Still after all these years in conflict zones, I am struck by how hope for peace sprouts when it is at its worst.
The next message is from two sisters in Gaza. I met them many years ago, during the war that was going on at the turn of 2008-2009. They had then lost their parents and two brothers. Now one of them is a mother herself and the other is studying to become a nurse. They are in northern Gaza, that is, the part that the Israeli military has told everyone to leave.
Both sisters write in the same chat: “Where should we leave? We do not understand? How? We are just ordinary people and have nothing to do with this,” writes the younger sister.
“I’m an orphan and I don’t want my own children to be. I can’t calm them down. They just cry,” writes the older sister.
I ask again, if they can’t get south?
“We don’t know where. We have made the decision to stay at home and wait for death.”
Death. I don’t know how to answer that. That too final. But then it comes again – hope.
“Do you think there is a chance for a truce?”
I don’t think anyone has an answer to that question, nor how many more lives will be taken on both sides.
There is only one response to send back:
“We can hope.”
“Yes,” the sisters answer.