Palestinian Boy Stubs Toe

Family members rushed to help, slightly injuring eight cameramen who had been transferred from covering the Syrian conflict.

Yatta, near Hebron, September 7 – A Palestinian boy on his way to school this morning accidentally hurt his toe on a protruding piece of rock in the road, drawing renewed attention to the plight of Palestinian youth forced to watch where they are walking while outside under Israeli occupation.

Journalists converged on the village through the morning, competing for camera angles and access to Abed Aziz, the boy’s father. Activists from European NGOs set up a podium for a press conference in the family’s front yard so that Aziz, 42, could hold forth for the cameras.

“Ahmad was minding his own business, walking to school, even playing along the way, as children are supposed to do,” recalled a tearful Aziz. “Suddenly the entire village heard him gasp and yell, ‘Ow!’ and the next thing you know, he was yelping and holding his foot.” The father of seven held up a scuffed sneaker. “This… this is all that’s left of his shoe.”

“He’s had that toe his whole life!” wailed Aziz, whose older sons had to support him from either side. Other family members rushed to help, slightly injuring eight cameramen who had been transferred from covering the Syrian conflict.

Calls for revenge and justice echoed through the village in the incident’s aftermath, with about a dozen youths clambering over a neighboring hill to hurl stones and firebombs at an IDF check point. Israeli troops dispersed the crowd with tear gas and rubber bullets. A bullet caused bruising on the left calf of one of the injured boy’s cousins, further compounding the villagers’ anger.

By midday, cooler heads had prevailed, but the family insisted no true justice could be had until the Israelis no longer occupying the land. “The continuing oppression is the root cause of this madness,” said Salah Aziz, 44, Ahmad’s uncle. “The very ground protests the presence of Israelis on it. Nothing of this sort ever happened in the Palestine of my youth,” he added, apparently forgetting that the land was already under Israeli control when he was born.

Villagers regaled the assembled journalists with recollections of other injustices suffered by Ahmad while under occupation. “Two months ago he lost a tooth – not just had it fall out, but actually lost it,” said Mustafa Hijazi, a neighbor. “We don’t have proof, but it would be just like the colonialist occupier to harvest little children’s teeth to redeem them for money from the Tooth Fairy.”

“I hope the Tooth Fairy runs them over with a car,” he added.

Please support our work through Patreon.