Palestine Letter: How do I tell the story?

As a reporter and messenger of people’s stories and experiences, I always have to credit my quotes and sources and relay the names of the story. Sometimes the name of the martyr is Khader, sometimes Abdulrahman, sometimes Adam, sometimes a name that even I, an Arabic speaker, struggle to pronounce in my native Arabic tongue. I think of my readers, English speakers, and wonder if such a foreign name can detract from registering the words, and reality, around it. 

What if instead, it was, little Eric? Just two years old, a cute little boy with a lisp still learning to command his tongue around the syllables of understandable language. His father, Bob, stands beside him, but to little Eric, Bob hovers above his small body. When I see the physical difference in size between father and son, they feel as father and son. 

A few meters away, a group of men in green go up the gray tower standing in front of their gated community. In just a few moments, a car is chased and shot at by an armored vehicle. The first shot. The second. The third. The fourth. The 30th. One of them, maybe the tenth or the twentieth, it is impossible to tell, hits Eric.

The skull of a two-year-old still has a soft spot on the anterior fontanelle. The brain of a two-year-old is at a stage of developing their emotional brain. They are sponges, ready to absorb the light angles that twitch and flicker across what rests on this globe. Eric’s skull and brain are hit and ruptures. 

His father gets a bullet to the shoulder. And lives. Eric gets taken to a hospital across an invisible border and dies. His corpse is brought to the other side of the border hours later. His body is buried near that home where the men came chasing a car, shooting bullets in all directions. In the time it took the first half of Eric’s skull to reach its final formation, the last six months, another 27 children and minors had also been killed by groups of men who invaded their communities and carried out pre-meditated murder. 

How do I report that Eric is Mohammad al-Tamimi, two-years-old, from the town of Nabi Saleh, 20 kilometers northwest of Ramallah, and his father is Haitham al-Tamimi? The men that came chasing with bullets were army men, and their vehicles were military jeeps, and the communities are actually Palestinian enclaves that are prisons the size of villages and towns being guarded by 18 to 30-year-olds with some of the most technologically advanced weapons in the world. 

In the last six months, Palestine has been confronting a war imposed and declared by a foreign regime with the purpose of dispossessing them. For academics of international relations, this is an ethno-nationally motivated crime. What do you call an ethno-nationally motivated crime that has been getting carried out daily for 27,740 days? 

How do I report that in a way that registers?