The drone’s high-pitched whine cuts through the room like an unwelcome guest. Julia Abu Warda, three years old, sits cross-legged on the floor, eyes fixed on a flickering cartoon of a blue chicken, its animated feathers bobbing in time to a tinny melody. The cartoon's cheer struggles to mask the tense atmosphere, the kind that only adults know to hide.

Her father, Mohammed, crouches beside her, absently patting her hair, feeling a familiar pang as he watches her, immersed in the imaginary. His mind flashes back to a few days ago, to the last time he’d seen her face so intent, yet so different, through the lens of a soldier’s camera.

In that moment, Julia had been the smallest figure in a sea of men, huddled near the back, her body half-swallowed in the crowd of exhausted faces. They had been herded toward an Israeli checkpoint, the air thick with smoke and fear. Mohammed remembers how the soldiers had stripped the men to their underwear, searching for concealed weapons. The men’s faces were tight with fear, eyes on the ground, but Julia—she was looking away, as if something beyond the camera had caught her attention. Or perhaps she’d simply wanted to look at anything but the men with guns.

They’d been running for days, from the crumbling of their house to the crumbling of every other building around them, carrying whatever they could—clothes, a few cans of food, a stuffed bear Julia clung to until she couldn’t any longer. And then, amid the confusion of the crowd, he’d been separated from Amal, his wife, and Hamza, their toddler, losing sight of them in the crush of bodies. Julia, small and resilient, had held tight to his hand as they moved through the checkpoint. He’d tried to shield her from seeing too much: the bodies on the ground, the collapsing walls, the look in people’s eyes as they passed, every face turned away from the wreckage.

She hadn’t cried until they were back in Gaza City, after the checkpoint ordeal, reunited with her mother and grandfather in a dim room shared by relatives and strangers alike. It was then, in a rare moment of silence, that Julia had finally broken down, calling out for her mother and, in the next breath, asking for her cousin Yahya. But Yahya was gone, lost to a drone strike in Jabalia two weeks prior—a friend taken too soon, a playmate vanished before she could understand why. Now, every time she heard that telltale hum of the drone, she pointed skyward, a question in her eyes.

Today, her father remembers the heaviness of that moment, the shock of seeing her there, of realizing how much this child had borne in her short life. He touches her shoulder gently, pulling her from the cartoon.

“Who are you?” he asks, his voice filled with something between grief and tenderness.

She turns to him, stretching her name into something sweet, soft, defiant.

“Jooliaa.”