Deadly cold!

In the darkness of the night, the sting of the cold, and the bitterness of living among the rubble, children and adults inside the tents groan from silent pain, which makes the trembling hearts tremble, and its pains gnaw at the fragile bones from the heavy loads that hundreds of families who have lost their support and the pillar of their tent are groaning under in the heat of the described genocide.

Temperatures have dropped below zero over the past few nights, exacerbating the suffering of the tent dwellers. They were shocked by the freezing of their tender bodies, unable to withstand the deadly cold, such as the sixty-day-old girl Sham, who died with five other children after the tents turned into refrigerators.

If it weren’t for the blankets and “bakaja” that UNRWA distributed to the residents in the refugee tents and brick houses after the 1948 Nakba, many children would have frozen to death. Our mothers and grandmothers would ward off the sting of the cold with the “oven sting” or the brazier that they would light until its fires intensified, distributing warmth throughout the house. Our faces would turn red like the embers of the stove, and our laughter would rise as we approached zero distance from its heat. We would sleep when drowsiness overcame us, with warm hearts, in the shadow of the mothers who would lean over us and rush to cover whoever was exposed among us, while we stretched out on the ground like a solid structure, sleeping with reassured breaths under the blankets and thin quilts laminated with whatever was available from the remains of the fabrics.