[activeStick]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6269pd5y2ko

Aya al-Dabeh was 13 years old and was living with her family and hundreds of other refugees at a school in Tal al-Hawa, in Gaza City in the north. She was one of nine children.

One day at the start of the war Aya went to go to the bathroom upstairs at the school and - her family says - she was shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper. The Israel Defense Forces say they do not target civilians and blame Hamas for attacking from civilian areas. During the war the UN Human Rights Office said that that there has been "intense shooting by Israeli forces in densely populated areas resulting in apparently unlawful killings, including of unarmed bystanders."

When the Israeli military took over the school Lina fled south. She went with four other children - two daughters and two sons - to reunite with her husband who'd gone earlier with the couple's other children. Lina had no option but to leave her daughter where she lay, hoping to come back and recover the remains for a proper burial once peace came.

"Aya was a very kind girl, and everyone loved her. She used to love everyone, her teachers and her studies, and she was very good at school. She wished well for everyone," Lina says. When the ceasefire came Lina asked relatives still living in the north to check up on Aya's grave. The news was devastating.

"They informed us that her head was in one place, her legs were in another, while her ribs were somewhere else. The one who went to visit her was shocked and sent us the pictures," she says.

"When I saw her, I couldn't understand how my daughter was taken out of her grave, and how did the dogs eat her? I can't control my nerves."

The relatives have collected the bones and soon Lina and her family will travel north to carry Aya's remains to a proper grave. For Lina, there is grief with no end, and a question that has no answer - the same question that sits with so many parents who lost children in Gaza. What could they have done differently, the circumstances of the war being what they were?

"I couldn't take her from where she was buried," says Lina. Then she asks: "Where could I have taken her?"

The Israeli government has banned the BBC and other international news organisations from entering Gaza and reporting independently.

Truly a special and rare kind of cruelty that the thousands of Israeli perpetrators in the IDF and government possess. For the vast majority of humans, doing these sorts of things would be incredibly hard. Not them though.