It was December, 2025. Rafik was four years old. He had been born in Gaza in November, 2021, in the wake of a two-week bombing campaign by Israel, and as a new father I hadn’t known how quickly those circumstances would shape his childhood. A boy of small, playful routines—lining up his toy cars in rows, wearing his sneakers on the wrong feet—he had never been to school before Paterson.