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The child Ali Kdouh carried his backpack heading to his school on the first day. He jumped for joy in the outskirts of his village of Soultanieh even though his backpack and clothes weren't new like his classmates in class, and when he got home, his words were racing ahead of his breath which related his day's adventures to his mother.
He removed his school uniform and had lunch in a hurry and went out to play with the neighbor's girl at the house next door as they usually did in the afternoons of summers past.
This is what happened, but today Soultanieh mourns Ali, our flower that never fully blossomed... we mourn him as he barely come to six years of age, as it was his first day of school... and his last.
Only half an hour before iftar did Ali ascend as an angel in this special night when the angels descend to Earth, so he broke his date with his friend Amal Meselmene, his neighbor and peer, and he didn't follow her so they can play on the computer as he promised her. Rather, he had a date with martyerdom which waited for him at the corner of the field which separated his home for that of the neighbors, where his life was taken away by a cluster bomb from the bombs of Israeli hate.
Translated from As-Safir by Mohamed Fakhreddine.
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Ali Kdouh
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