Khan Younis, Gaza Strip – It is 5:30 in the morning. The sun hasn’t fully risen, but 15-year-old Mahmoud rubs the sleep from his eyes.He woke up this morning not in a warm bed, but on a thin mattress in a crowded tent – displaced, like hundreds of thousands of others in Gaza.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listAnd Mahmoud did not reach for a schoolbag to get ready for school. Instead, he picked up a rough, frayed burlap sack.“The sack is empty now, but I feel its weight even before I fill it,” Mahmoud said, as he looked at his palms, calloused and scarred from carrying the sack around Khan Younis’s streets, planning to begin his day. “My back hurts before I even start walking.”But Mahmoud insisted that he has to fill his sack – even if that comes at the expense of his childhood and his education.The young Palestinian is forced by the economic situation in Gaza, brought on by Israel’s genocidal war, to spend his days filling his sack with items that can be used as fuel for his family.Nylon, cardboard and scraps of wood find their way into his sack.“Sometimes I walk for six hours just to find a few pieces of wood,” Mahmoud said, describing his daily routine. “The dust from the rubble gets into my lungs. I cough all night. But I can’t stop, there is no fire to bake bread.”Mahmoud feels a deep sense of responsibility for his family. He explained that his father was killed in an Israeli air strike early last year, one of more than 70,000 Pales …
