ASHES BETWEEN US 🇮🇷🇮🇱 The war wasn’t supposed to happen😢 It began with a strike—a single missile in the dead of night. No warning. No time to run. The air raid sirens in Tel Aviv and Tehran cried in unison, as if mourning before the dead were counted. But war does not wait for grief. In Tehran, Leila was a mother of two, a teacher, a poet in private. Her husband, Reza, worked nights in a hospital—he was there when the first bombs hit. She called and called. No answer. Hours later, she found his name on a list—unidentified body #27. All that remained of him was his wedding ring, scorched and bent. Leila’s eyes stopped crying after that. Her son, Ali, just six, kept asking, “Is Baba in the sky now?” In Tel Aviv, Daniel was a soldier. He had just turned nineteen. His younger sister, Yael, used to braid his hair when they were little, before he grew too old and too proud. The night before deployment, they sat on the rooftop, watching the stars through smoke. "Don't be a hero," she told him, voice trembling. "I won’t," he promised, not knowing how to keep it. Three weeks later, a roadside bomb ripped through his convoy outside the border. He survived—but with no legs, and a brother in arms who died screaming beside him. Daniel no longer slept. He refused prosthetics. He said, “My legs are still with him, somewhere in the sand.” And then came the drone strike that changed everything. It misfired—landed in a school yard in Qom. Dozens of children. No military base in sight. The footage went viral before it was censored. Tiny shoes. Ash-covered backpacks. Fathers screaming into rubble. And the world, for a moment, looked up from its screens. Leila wrote one final poem that day. She folded it into a plastic bottle and threw it into the sea in Kish. “We were never enemies. You loved your children. So did I. Now they play among ruins. And the sky holds only smoke.” That bottle washed ashore in Jaffa weeks later. A little girl found it. She didn’t understand the Farsi, but her mother did. Her mother was Yael. She wept. She wept for Leila. For Daniel. For Reza. For Ali. For the children whose names she’d never know. She folded the paper again and placed it on her brother’s wheelchair tray. And Daniel—for the first time since the war began—closed his eyes and whispered, “Maybe we aren’t so different.” #AshesBetweenUs 🇮🇷🇮🇱 #documentary