On the morning of Oct. 24, 2023, an Israeli missile struck my father’s house in Rafah City in the southernmost part of Gaza, then designated a “safe zone” by the Israeli military. The missile exploded only 5 ft. from where I sat with my children.
The attack killed my 13-year old son Abdullah and six others; my 10-year-old niece Joud, my stepmother Intisar, my aunt Fatima, my aunt Khariyya, my cousin Fawziyya, and our neighbor Hamad. It also seriously injured 10 of us, including myself and two of my other three children. Only my son Abdelrahman was spared; he was out of the house in a long line waiting to buy bread.
Those of us who survived grabbed what little we could scramble together and made our way across the city into a small apartment that my brother had rented before the war, which I and many experts consider a genocide. This tiny two-bedroom apartment was never meant to house 20 people, but we had no other choice. Rafah was overcrowded with displaced Palestinians as, weeks into Israel’s war, the Israeli army ordered everyone from northern Gaza to evacuate south.
With poor medical infrastructure in Rafah due to the war, I spent several weeks at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the second largest city in Gaza, recovering from injuries and filled with grief from the loss of my dear son Abdullah. My children Mohammad and Batool, and my sister Banan, whose leg was amputated after the airstrike, were miraculously able to leave Gaza to receive medical treatment abroad. They were lucky to get out before Israel seized the Rafah crossing into Egypt in May, and destroyed it in June. Tens of thousands have not been so lucky.
The amount of suffering I saw in the hospital is beyond human endurance. The influx of corpses was endless. Without enough ambulances to carry them, body after body of the dead arrived in private cars or donkey carts. Mothers, fathers, and loved ones…
