Aya al-Shawa, 10, holds one of her most treasured possessions as she sits in sixth grade at a school in northern Gaza. It is not a toy or a phone. It is a book, and it arrived in her hands only recently.
The book’s journey to her was a hard one, Al Jazeera reported on Sunday. It once sat on a bookshelf, in a building that an Israeli attack demolished, and lay buried beneath the rubble. One day someone pulled it out, cleaned it, sorted its pages and repaired them. Then it reached a new reader.
With Gaza’s libraries, schools and homes destroyed after years of war, the books that survive carry a weight they didn’t before. For a girl in sixth grade, one of them is now the thing she prizes most.