By John Lloyd

I didn’t know him.  But I knew his father. Or it might be better to say that I saw his father. The old man was the night watchman at the American International School of Gaza where I taught 5th grade.

He used to greet the teachers in the morning as they started work. As I was watching him work one morning I realized that he would never leave the Strip.  No passport, wrong passport, relative of a fugitive, whatever. 

Thousands and thousands of people are trapped in Gaza for various reasons.  This old man was just one on them.  That weekend I was thinking of him while visiting the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.  I bought a set of prayer beads along the Via d’La Rosa.  Back in Gaza I pressed the beads into his hands when he greeted us at the beginning of our next school day.  I said: “ Al Haram Sharif” and “Al Quds” in my grade school Arabic; he got the idea.  His eyes teared a little and he thanked me. Sometimes kindness is all that Gazans have.

That was four years ago.  I finished my teaching year and came home.  I heard that the old man died a couple of years after that.   When he died the school gave his job to his son Salem Mohammad.  So it was the son who was on duty the morning of January 3rd at 4:00 AM when the bombs came.  The F16’s come in low and fast in Gaza.  As a practical matter there is no time to react.  And there are constant flyovers, so people learn to just ignore them. 

After all, Salem Mohammed was guarding the American School,  the one building in Gaza that the Israelis had promised not to attack.  He probably didn’t even have time to look up.

The American International School in Gaza was reduced to rubble and is no more.  In the debris somewhere they found the body of Salem Mohammed Abu Klaik, age 24.  I wonder what became of the prayer beads?