Underage, Under Fire
In the web of battered, sun-baked streets winding up the hillside, bloodshed is as unrelenting as the heat. So it is not hard to see why, when raid sirens and gunfire erupted yet again on a morning in late May, 15-year-old Mahmoud Hamadneh turned his bike down an alley that held out the promise of refuge.
The narrow lane, a few hundred yards from his school, looks like an urban oasis, shaded by olive branches that reach across walls on either side. On a recent afternoon the cooing of doves and whine of cicadas amplified its stillness. Only the faded stain of Mahmoud’s blood in the pavement and a stone, hand-lettered with his name, betrayed the illusion.
“He didn’t do anything. He didn’t make a single mistake,” says Amjad Hamadneh, whose son, a buzz-cut devotee of computer games, was one of two teens killed that morning in the opening minutes of a raid by Israeli forces.
“If he’d been a freedom fighter or was carrying a weapon, I would not be so emotional,” says his father, an unemployed construction worker. “But he was taken just as easily as water going down your throat. He only had his books and a pencil case.”
