Ritaj Rayhan
Age 9
Ritaj Rihan was 9 years old, in the 3rd grade. She was conceived through five years of infertility treatment: her mother Ola’s first child and the center of her parents’ lives. She took very great pride in her school clothes and school books. In fact, she took joy in finally going back to school at all. Her family said she had been preparing for this for a long time. She’d long dreamed of being a student who only had to worry about homework.
Their home had been bombed. And so, the family lived in a fragile tent they made over the rubble of their own house. Despite this, her parents walked her almost a mile to and from school every day because she had missed two years of education and was excited to finally be back in a classroom. The school itself had already been leveled. A makeshift classroom tent had been set up on the rubble only five days before she was targeted.
On the morning of April 9, 2026, Ritaj put on a new dress she had picked out herself and asked her mother to decorate it with accessories. She walked to the tent classroom with her workbook. Then, she sat in a third-grade math class with around forty other little boys and girls. Ritaj was solving subtraction of four-digit numbers. She stood at the front of the class, waiting for her teacher to look at her notebook.
An Israeli trooper positioned along the Yellow Line cycled through the young children in their tent through a scope. The man watched Ritaj in her new dress, decorated by her mother, standing at the front of a classroom full of children. The predator decided to put a single bullet through her mouth. It set the crosshairs on Ritaj’s lips and tore the bullet into her as she corrected her math problems. She fell dead in front of her panicking and screaming classmates.
There was no ambulance—Israeli forces had shut down or destroyed almost every single hospital in northern Gaza. Ritaj was rushed to the nearest building on a horse cart. She was pronounced dead on arrival before her parents ever saw her. Her last words remain visible on the bloodied notebook: “Our village is clean...” Her father, Abdul, keeps the notebook. The ink on the pages is still stained—subtraction problems with blank spaces where the answers were supposed to go.
Her mother, still trapped in Gaza, told CBC News: “If I had known that she would go to school and never come back, I wouldn’t have let her go. I would have told her that I wanted her to stay home with us.”
The votes that paid for the weapons
Joint Resolution, S.J.Res. 33: Block arms sale to Israel—2000-lb bombs (reattempt)
House Bill, H.R. 8034: Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024
House Bill, H.R. 815 (Senate): National Security Supplemental—Trojan Horse (shell: Veterans bill)