"It is 5:30 in the morning. The sun hasn't fully risen, but 15-year-old Mahmoud rubs the sleep from his eyes. He woke up this morning not in a warm bed, but on a thin mattress in a crowded tent displaced, like hundreds of thousands of others in Gaza. list of 3 itemsend of list And Mahmoud did not reach for a schoolbag to get ready for school. Instead, he picked up a rough, frayed burlap sack."
"The sack is empty now, but I feel its weight even before I fill it, Mahmoud said, as he looked at his palms, calloused and scarred from carrying the sack around Khan Younis's streets, planning to begin his day. My back hurts before I even start walking. But Mahmoud insisted that he has to fill his sack even if that comes at the expense of his childhood and his education."
Mahmoud, a 15-year-old in Khan Younis, wakes before dawn in a crowded tent after displacement and instead of attending school carries a frayed burlap sack to collect nylon, cardboard and scrap wood for fuel. He walks long hours, coughs from dust and bears back pain and calloused hands while searching for pieces of wood he sometimes walks six hours to find. His father was killed in an air strike, leaving him responsible as his mother's eldest amid deep poverty. Gaza’s massive casualties and economic collapse force many children to trade education and childhood for basic survival.
Read at www.aljazeera.com
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