ALPHARETTA, Ga. — Almost one month ago, the Israel-Hamas war broke out.
The conflict has polarized communities all over the world, but one local organization wants everyone to know about the most vulnerable and innocent casualties.
A local Muslim organization wants to illustrate how tragic the Israel-Hamas conflict has been, and they are using kids' shoes to do that.
“Each shoe pair shows 100 kids that have lost their lives. They could have been here. They should have been here, but these lives are gone," said Asra Mansoor of the Voices of Muslims. "Two hundred of them were babies, not even toddlers. They were babies under the age of one."
There are 400 pairs of children’s shoes right at the center of Downtown Alpharetta’s town square -- the pairs representing thousands of dead children.
Resident Emad Sabbah said his relatives are among them.
“I’m a Palestinian who lost four members of his family exactly 24 days ago. In Nabolis, not in the Gaza Strip. Not in the Gaza strip, in the West Bank by settlers who killed those four young ones," Emad Sabbah said.
Organizers said thousands of children in the Gaza region have been killed in the war so far.
A banner displaying the names of some of those children sits in front of the footwear, but organizers say they would need many more to display all of the victims' names.
“We didn’t have enough space on the banner," Mansoor said. There could have been 16 banners, and still we wouldn’t be able to put all the names on those banners."
Mansoor said she’s hoping that laying out all of the kids' shoes in an area highly visited by Alpharetta’s community will bring awareness to the most vulnerable and innocent lives of both Palestinian and Israeli children who have perished.