Photo by Kenny Rae / Oxfam America

In February I spent three days in Gaza witnessing firsthand how a bombing campaign and land invasion have affected children there. In Beit Lahiya I watched a girl, perhaps 5 years old, pick through the rubble of what must have been her house. She pulled out–then triumphantly held up–a battered stuffed toy to show her two older brothers.

I passed a school in Beit Lahiya that had been shelled. From the street all that was visible was a neat hole, perhaps 5 feet in diameter. By walking into the school yard, I saw that the shell had exploded inside the building, blowing out the walls of six classrooms. Why had this happened? I saw none of the tell tale signs of fighting between Palestinian militants and Israeli soldiers: no pock marks from bullets on the walls; no cartridge casings on the ground. Just the gaping hole where a single shell had been fired into the building and the destruction that resulted from it. Where would children in this neighborhood go to school now?

In Jabaliya, while accompanying a medical team from Oxfam’s partner PMRS, I watched as a baby, gasping for breath from a respiratory condition, was treated by doctors in a makeshift clinic. In that half-finished building, the child’s mother hovered anxiously beside the card table that doctors had set up on the dirt floor to examine the youngest patients.

In a neighborhood in Jabaliya, I took some time to walk around, trying to figure out the rationale for the destruction of nearly every house. Many were razed, not by bombs or artillery, but by bulldozers. A teenage girl sat in front of what had been her family’s home, unfazed by my camera, seemingly numb. She is now one of Gaza’s thousands of homeless children.

Children have been tasked with the job of fetching water, and I photographed a number of them gathered around the 2,000-liter tanks that Oxfam has set up in various schools and neighborhoods. I shared a rare moment of laughter with one boy. From a distance, I couldn’t figure out what he was up to. Framed by a backdrop of terrible destruction, he was standing guard over an empty plastic juice container. Moving closer, I realized what was going on: a tiny amount of water was springing up from a broken pipe and he was patiently waiting for his bottle to fill up. I figure that it would have taken 30 minutes of his patience to get a half gallon. We both smiled as our eyes met, then simultaneously burst into laughter.  Whether he was laughing at his small victory or at me or at the absurdity of it all, I can’t say.

As a humanitarian aid worker, I had thought that my exposure to adversity over the last few years–in destroyed villages in Afghanistan, in coastal communities in Sri Lanka struck by the tsunami, in mountainous villages following the Pakistan earthquake, in Biloxi following Katrina–had toughened me. But I guess I was wrong. In 14-year-old Abdul’s house, I cried. This boy had been walking in the street with his brother when a missile from a helicopter struck a nearby building. His brother escaped with cuts on his arm from shrapnel. Abdul was less fortunate; metal fragments from the missile pierced his skull.

According to his mother, Abdul had been a keen soccer player–kicking a ball around outside until dark. It’s unlikely that he will ever join the others playing in the dusty streets; he is now paralyzed and barely able to speak. I stood idly by as a doctor from PMRS examined him and a therapist worked with him to try to restore some limited mobility.

Why was my encounter with Abdul so emotional? I glanced at his medical chart, and saw that he was the same age as my own son, their birthdays only a week apart. On hearing that I worked for Oxfam America, Abdul’s brother handed me a flat piece of metal with the manufacture’s label, which read: “GUIDED MISSILE, SURFACE ATTACK.” In smaller letters above, was stamped the missile’s serial number: “615244″ and to the left, the manufacturer’s name: “US.”