A boy stands in the ruins, his dog by his side, both facing what remains of home. Behind them, the Palestinian flag rises through the dust like a stubborn ember refusing to extinguish. The boy’s stance is not triumphant, but resolute; his companion, silent and watchful, shares in the vigil. Together they embody a truth older than rubble: that loyalty, whether to land, to memory, or to each other, outlasts the machinery of destruction.
This is Gaza not as abstraction, not as casualty count, but as lived endurance. The boy and his dog do not turn away from the devastation—they inhabit it, they claim it, they exist within it. The ruins are not backdrop but testimony, each shattered wall a ledger of violence. And yet within this wasteland, there is a flicker of continuity: the companionship of animal and human, the persistence of a flag, the refusal to vanish.
It is not sentimentality that lives here, but defiance. Even in the collapse of buildings, even in the weight of ash, there remains an unspoken declaration: we are still here.
