"It was a Friday like any other, she was happy. She wanted to go to the park with her aunt," says Ms. Kaddoum, 27.
But that day, faced with an "imminent threat", Israel launched a "preemptive attack" in the Gaza Strip against the Palestinian armed group Islamic Jihad, which responded with salvoes of rockets towards Israeli soil.
According to authorities in the Palestinian enclave under Israeli blockade and controlled by Hamas, another Islamist movement, 16 children were among the 46 people killed in the confrontation which continued until the entry into force of a ceasefire. Sunday night fire.
In her Chajaya neighborhood in Gaza City, Alaa was knocking on her aunt's door, ready to go play in the park, when a missile fell next to the girl, wearing a T-shirt pink to match the ribbon slipped through her brown hair.
Her mother Rasha holds the soiled t-shirt in her hands, unable to understand why her daughter died.
"My daughter had nothing to do with the missiles, it wasn't her fault," she said. "She was never able to go play in the park, her clothes were returned to me full of blood."
After the strike in which the girl was killed, the Israeli army said it targeted members of Islamic Jihad operating in the area.
It also maintains that Palestinians, including children, were killed by rockets fired by this Islamist organization towards Israel but fell by mistake into the Palestinian enclave.
But Alaa was killed on Friday afternoon, long before Islamic Jihad fired its first projectiles that evening. "What was the point of this war? We lost children," sighs Rasha Kaddoum.
- "Wasted childhoods" -
Elsewhere in Gaza City, some 200 meters from the Mediterranean Sea in a neighborhood where houses are stuck together, the home of the Shamalaghs was blown up on Saturday. Only a gaping hole remains.
In the rubble, a brand new fridge, a sofa crushed by tons of concrete, a stuffed animal and dozens of pages torn from what was an English textbook. "Think of your ideal location for a holiday".
Seventeen people remained here, including children, who had 30 minutes to leave before the airstrike, warned by the Israeli authorities.
"I couldn't sleep (...) I thought 'they (Israel) are going to strike'", recounts Nadia Shamalagh, 70, sitting near the rubble, which the neighborhood comes to inspect.
"Everyone was scared. The children couldn't stop crying. But they are not linked to Hamas, Fatah or Islamic Jihad!" she exclaimed.
Already in May 2021, 66 Palestinian minors and two other Israelis had died during an 11-day blitzkrieg between Israel and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza that killed more than 270 people in all.
In a report published in June, the British organization Save the Children was alarmed at "childhoods ruined by five escalations of violence and a decade and a half of blockade" Israeli, imposed since the seizure of power by Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
Gazan children "have repeatedly experienced or witnessed traumatic events and serious violations of their rights", underlined the NGO.
Weary, Nadia Shamalagh repeats over and over: "What is this life? Are we going to continue to live this tragedy?"
Behind her, girls have recovered a wooden plank which they balanced on a piece of concrete. One on each side and the board becomes a modest seesaw.
