Aya and her family felt extremely bored of staying home all the long days of the war since it started. No sooner had they stepped outside to breathe the morning soft and dewy air than an Israeli tank took them off guard and shot a missile at them. The missile hit little Aya and shattered her body. She was the first child among her brothers. She was top in everything. She was top of her class, she was top in receiving her parents and kin’s love. Why not? Her heart started to beat inside her mother’s womb after a three year medical treatment journey after marriage. Now, the mother has lost the apple of her eye. Now, she keeps looking for her pictures and clothes which she used to select with great care. When she gets them, she brings them close to her face and smells the scent of her lost baby and continues crying till her husband approaches her and blames her. She only stops crying then so that her husbands may do the same. She prays God that they should join Aya in Paradise.

Aya was known to have a big heart and a deep love for her mother. When her mother was recently pregnant, in spite of her little age, Aya insisted on helping her so that the ”unborn” Ahmed might not be hurt in her womb. As labor time approached, she recurrently begged her mother to allow her to accompany her to the hospital. She wished the baby “Ahmed” would be born on her hands. She wanted to be the first person to cuddle the baby and babble with him. She wanted to name him “Ahmed”

Her mother asserts that Aya’s desire to be the first one to carry the baby was so overpowering that her grandmother used to tease her by laughingly telling her she would not take her to the hospital when labor time comes. “Then Aya would earnestly beg me not to send her to her grandparents’ when she would go to hospital.” Says her mother. Aya used to say, “I’d like to go with you and be the first one to touch Ahmed when he is born.” But, she had gone for ever and Ahmed had not been born except after a few weeks from day of her martyrdom.”

Aya was so deeply attached to the embryo brother before seeing him. She bought him a number of toys and many playthings, and stashed them till the moment he would get out of his mother’s womb and she would see him and give them to him.

In her nursery school she was also top according to her teacher. She was pretty, tidy, decent, and needed none to remind her of her homework. She was keen on doing her homework even before shedding her school uniform. After that she would sit at the dinner table. Her mother remembers how she used to keep her stationery intact, and she never lost any, even if it were a small remnant of a pencil which she used to sharpen at both ends. If one end was consumed, she used the other end to continue writing. She never missed the top scores with her teachers. May her soul rest in peace.”

Aya kept hoping to be a regular student in the first grade primary as a first step towards fulfilling her great dream of obtaining a medical degree to treat and cure the sick and injured people. She wished she could alleviate the pains of others. Her mother says she used to ask ,”when should I go to primary school?” The mother told her she had to complete the six months of her nursery schooling, then be six year old to be able to go a primary school. Aya objected to her mother’s information and said, “I’ve grown up. I am now five and a half years old and I am going to school. Her heart was filled with yearning for school which she had seen only its outside wall by which she used to pass on her way to the nursery.