Manal Sawan
Age 10
Manal was 8 years old. She was the older sister—a caretaker who calmed other children crying in her tent camp during bombings. She loved to make bougainvillea flower wreaths and put them on her grandmother’s head, saying: “Grandmother, you are the Queen of Gaza.” She also loved sitting on the rooftop at sunset watching the sea shimmer. Her favorite singer was Fairuz, and she always danced to Fairuz on her grandmother’s small radio.
She and her younger sister, Ammar (6), had matching yellow dresses because they liked pretending to be twins. They kept a secret box of wishes filled with a seagull’s feather, a seashell, and a smooth stone Ammar called a “lucky stone.”
Manal’s and Ammar’s family was also raising money to evacuate Gaza, and their grandmother was trying to keep them alive. Ammar and Manal celebrated during the ceasefire news in early January 2025, thinking they’d finally get to go somewhere safer and start school again. But after the world protested loudly, evacuation plans were canceled for children trapped in Gaza. On March 18, early at 2:30 in the morning, men from the Israeli military began bombing neighborhoods and tent camps everywhere in Gaza while people slept in the dark, murdering hundreds of girls and boys as Manal fearfully tried to reassure young, crying Ammar.
Months later, on June 19, 2025, an Israeli trooper playing with a drone in the Al-Shati tent shelter looked inside multiple families’ tents and saw Manal and Ammar playing with their grandmother in their tent. Manal was holding her grandmother’s right hand and Ammar was holding her left, a red apple still in Ammar’s pocket. Ammar had looked up at the sky, saw the man’s drone, and asked while grabbing the apple for her sister: “Manal, what’s that iron bird?” Manal quickly let go of her grandmother and reached for Ammar’s hand as the lady told them to run. The man shot a missile into the tent at the little girls. The explosion came before she could run with her sister.
Their grandmother barely survived the murders. Among the rubble of the destroyed tent, rescuers found the red apple, nearly intact, in Ammar’s small hand that no longer moved.
The votes that paid for the weapons
House Bill, H.R. 6126 (House): Emergency supplemental appropriations for Israel