LONDON: As Israeli air attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs intensified, 18-year-old university student Mohamad Nasrallah left his home and sought refuge in the more northerly neighborhood of Hamra, near the Lebanese American University where he was studying.

On Sept. 26, Mohamad and his sister, Mirna, made the fatal decision to return briefly to their home to collect some belongings.

Later, it emerged they had returned to collect some items to donate to the many displaced Lebanese who had fled north to escape the anticipated Israeli ground invasion, which would begin on Oct. 1.

While they were there, their building was hit by an Israeli airstrike, killing Mohamad and seriously injuring his sister.

Two months earlier, on July 27, an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket with a 50 kg warhead had struck the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

The rocket landed on a soccer pitch, killing 12 children enjoying a Saturday evening game and injuring dozens more.

Hezbollah has always denied its role in the attack, although it seems certain that the missile was fired from southern Lebanon and had overshot its intended target — an Israeli military base a few kilometers north of Majdal Shams.

The following day, 11 of the 12 victims, aged 11 to 16, were buried in their white coffins.

Initially, there had been hopes that the twelfth victim, 11-year-old Gevara Ebraheem, had somehow survived the blast.

For 24 hours he had been considered missing, even after the family discovered that he had not, as they were at first told, been taken alive to Ziv Medical Center in nearby Safed.

In fact, as Israeli authorities revealed that Sunday evening, after a painstaking examination of the scene, forensic investigators had concluded that the small child had been virtually obliterated by the blast.

Hundreds of mourners attended Gevara’s funeral the following day, when Majdal Shams received a visit from Israel’s then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who pledged the children’s deaths would be avenged.

“There’s no difference between a Jewish child who was murdered in the south of Israel on Oct. 7 and a Druze child who was murdered in the Golan Heights,” he told mourners at Gevara’s funeral.

He added: “It’s the same thing, these are our children … Hezbollah will pay a price for this.”

Not everyone shared Gallant’s wish for vengeance. Nabeeh Abu Saleh, a paramedic who had rushed to the scene of the attack to find his nephew among the dead, told the Associated Press: “We buried our children. We don’t want retaliation.

“We have families in Lebanon, in Syria, and we have brothers here.”

Nevertheless, just three days later, senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr, deemed responsible for the Majdal Shams attack, was killed, along with an Iranian military adviser, in a targeted Israeli airstrike on his residential building in Beirut.

Also reported killed were his wife, two other women, and two children.

In one sense, it might seem invidious to highlight just two deaths out of the tens of thousands that have occurred in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon since the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

But in the face of so much death, there is a danger of succumbing to the proverb attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin — that one death is a tragedy, but thousands merely a statistic — and losing sight of the individual suffering behind each number.

Although they lived lives separated by birth, borders, and beliefs, Mohamad Nasrallah and Gevara Ebraheem share one thing in common — in death, they were mourned as individuals by families, friends, and communities.

What is more, as young people whose hopes, dreams, and potential have been violently cut short, they must also be grieved as representatives of a lost future.

While Gevara meant everything to his surviving parents and younger brother, few details have emerged about his life.

A photograph released by his family shows a happy boy, as mad about soccer as any child his age. In it, he sports Real Madrid’s 23-24 home kit. In another photograph, held aloft by mourners at his funeral, Gevara, smiling broadly, is wearing a red Zeus club football top.

But like all children in the region whose futures hang daily in the balance, it is clear that Gevara was both aware of the precarious and volatile nature of the world around him, and yearned desperately for better days ahead.

According to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, just days after the start of the Gaza war, the 10-year-old posted a simple but moving plea on Facebook: “We don’t want war,” he wrote. “We want to live in peace.”

Gevara would be granted only the peace of the grave. The path in life that he might have taken, and the light he might have been able to bring to the world, will now never be known.

But his death is no less poignant than that of Mohamad Nasrallah, whose future was already more clearly defined.

On Dec. 10, Mohamad’s friends and family gathered on the Beirut campus of the Lebanese American University to pay tribute to one of its brightest students, as he was described in a report on the memorial published on the university’s website on Dec. 17.

Mohamad, a business student with dreams of establishing a startup, “had already accomplished so much” and “had built strong friendships at LAU and everywhere he went.”

The memorial was attended by Mohamad’s father Ali, mother Fadia, and sisters Dana, Sally, and Mirna, who was still recovering from her injuries.

Dana, Mohamad’s eldest sister, 10 years his senior, recalled how her brother had been determined to graduate top of his class and be selected as his year’s commencement speaker.

“Our brother and his ambitions were larger than life,” she said. That she was addressing his classmates instead at his memorial “brought her to tears,” the LAU reporter wrote.

Some of Mohamad’s many friends also spoke at the memorial. Angelina El Zaghir beseeched her fellow classmates to “speak his name and carry forward his life, dreams, and love, because Mohamad would have wanted us to.”

Dani Taan pledged to make his best friend proud.

Mohammad Shouman said he took strength from “looking around and seeing that my tears are part of a collective well, which pours water from your martyrdom and hope from your existence.”

It fell to Dr. Raed Mohsen, the university’s dean of students and co-founder of the Lebanese Association for Mediation and Conciliation, to urge Mohamad’s fellow students to embrace that hope and reject despair.

“Witnessing your resolve to strive for a better future offers us some consolation,” he said. “We can see Mohamad’s unfaltering spirit in every one of you.”

As 2024 draws to a close, it is a message that will resonate with thousands of families across the region, each one mourning their own Mohameds and Gevaras and hoping against hope that 2025 will mark the beginning of that better future.