“I will not forget the massacre until I go to my grave,” says Mohammed. The last time he saw his father, Shawkat, was when he was lined up with some nine other men at a wall in Shatila. He remembers how his father had to raise his hands, placing them on the wall shoulder-width apart. As the little child walked hurriedly away through the narrow alleyways of the wretched Shatila camp with his mother and sister, they heard a loud burst of bullets. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Daddy must have escaped and he will come back to us.’” After several days, however, Mohammed knew that he would never see his father again. The Daily Star’s Cilina Nasser talks with Sabra and Shatila survivors on the 21st anniversary of the massacre. Read more about "We did not have one good day since the massacre" 

“When my oranges bloomed” my mother used to tell us, talking about her family’s orange trees in Palestine before 1948, “You could smell their blossom all day and all night and for miles around.” We would be sitting around her absorbing every word she had to say about her family’s farm in old Palestine, about her father who was so good in grafting orange trees he was hired by neighboring farmers, both Arab and Jewish, to do theirs. I remember how a smile would slowly appear on her face whenever she talked about “her oranges”. Rick Ikhrais writes from Texas. Read more about The Smell of Home