“My precious ones are gone, my preciouses are gone, Sahar,” said Shaima, 26, one of my best friends from college. In the blink of an eye, my dear friend had become an orphan, losing both parents and a brother. Shaima’s voice shook through her tears, her body shivering as well as she told me the unbelievable story of how her family members were killed.
Her old cheerful self, always brimming with joy, seemed to have gone with them. The person in front of me was gaunt from severe weight loss, much older looking, and missing the trademark sparkle in her eyes.
New Year’s Day was supposed to offer a glimmer of hope for the Alhaddad family, which had already experienced months of suffering because of the Israeli invasion of Gaza and its subsequent genocide of Palestinians. Instead, it turned out to be a catastrophic day of calamitous loss for the family of 11, when Shaima and her siblings met the same fate as too many daughters and sons of Gaza.
The family had taken refuge in Ahmed Abd-Alaziz School in Khan Younis, hoping in vain that the location — their third refuge after displacement — would be a safe place, preventing the family from certain death. But soon after arriving at the school, Israeli forces killed Shaima’s parents and brother, ripping the family tree from its roots.
An unending night and a desperate search
It all started when a house just next to the school was bombed by an airstrike, and a frightened man came asking the school residents for help excavating the targeted house for martyrs and injured people. Shaima’s father, Osama Alhaddad, 50 years old, didn’t hesitate to respond to the call for help and quickly headed to the smoldering house to give a helping hand alongside some other men.
After long hours of waiting for Osama to return, the family received word that the unstable building had collapsed on him and the others at his side who had been looking for survivors. They needed an ambulance, but the poor mobile connection made it impossible to communicate with staff at Al-Nasser, the nearest hospital.
Osama’s wife Gada, 46, and their son Ahmed, 22, rushed to the hospital on foot to bring an ambulance to the site. By this time, it was afternoon and Israeli forces decided to declare the area as a fighting zone and marked it as red.
As more and more bombs fell, the majority of families sheltering on the school grounds fled — but the Alhaddad family stayed, waiting for news of their father’s fate, as well as for their mother and brother to return with an ambulance. As they waited, the day gave way to the darkness of night.
The siblings assumed that their mother Gada wasn’t able to return because of the lack of transportation, which was always hard to find, and even more so at night. They imagined their mother waiting for the light of day at the hospital, and they stayed up until dawn anticipating her return.
“It was the longest night of my life,” recalled Shaima.
Shaima and another woman who was searching for her husband ran out of patience waiting for news and decided to go to the building where the men were under the rubble. When they entered the neighborhood, they were shocked to find it mostly abandoned. The sounds of fighter jets, gunfire, and airstrikes pierced through the silence, and it was horrifying.
Ambulances or other forms of help were nowhere to be found. Shaima searched for openings in the rubble, looking for any sign of her father inside the damaged building. After her long search came up empty, she returned to the school to update her siblings.
Later, Shaima’s younger sister Diana, 24, returned to the site of the bombing with another woman who was looking for her husband — holding onto a sliver of hope that they could find the men alive. They looked and looked, and finally found a clearing in the rubble. Diana saw her father inside, and he was dead. She hurried back to her siblings for help and support.
Fighting for life through the pain of grief
Even while grieving the death of their father, the anxiety about their mother’s and brother’s fate grew stronger for Shaima and her siblings. Diana and her sister Salwa set out on foot to the hospital with their aunt in search of Gada and Ahmed. The other siblings, including Shaima, stayed at the school to take care of one another.
Along the route, the sisters found their mother and brother lying dead in the middle of the street. Gada’s injuries were internal, while Ahmed had serious external injuries and his blood was spilled all around him. It took time for them to accept that the shock of what they were seeing was indeed reality. They couldn’t leave them like that, so they asked for help from the few people who were still there; they put the bodies on an animal-pulled cart and went to the hospital to do the paperwork.
Inevitably, they had to go back to the school to deliver the news to their siblings. It was especially hard to shatter the hope of Karem and Nour, the 11-year-old twins who kept asking where their parents were and saying how badly they missed them. For the rest of the day, the siblings cried and held one another in rounds, exchanging sympathetic words of support. There were only three families left in the school, and bombing attacks in and around it were increasing. The Alhaddad siblings decided to escape once more.
Without their parents to lead them, the children didn’t quite know how to act and where to go. A quadcopter was shooting heavily and at random, so the siblings hid in one of the school’s classrooms until the firing stopped. They waited for three hours, terrified and unable to move while bombs dropped around them. Finally, an old man who was a neighbor snuck into the classroom and offered instructions for how to escape safely. The siblings followed his advice, walking single file with large spaces between one another and holding white surrender flags. They had to leave all of their belongings behind.
They made it to the Al-Nasser hospital and stayed there for a week trying to find help. The siblings were determined to find their father’s body so that they could bid him farewell and give him a proper burial. However, the ambulance that was going to retrieve the body from the house’s ruins was unable to reach the site because there was so much rubble from Israeli bombardment filling the streets.
“I sat outside the hospital, waiting for the ambulance to return my father’s body to us,” recalled Shaima. “Each time an ambulance arrived, I rushed ahead of the medics to search for my father’s body among all of the dead and injured, but I never found him.”
The children buried their mother and brother in a cemetery near the hospital.
Siblings care for each other in the face of great danger
The Alhaddad family is incomplete and missing its pillars, the parents. For the children, that loss is multiplied because they are constantly forced to make life-or-death decisions under war and genocide. In the months following the death of their parents, they were displaced another four times. The siblings were confused about where to go and didn’t even have access to a tent to live in, and they longed for direction from their mother and father.
After some time, a kind stranger finally helped them locate a tent under which to shelter. However, they do not have the income necessary to sustain life, and food products are extremely expensive and unaffordable. For the females, work is even harder to come by, and the male children are too young to carry the responsibility of supporting the family.
Even though the siblings will never get over what happened to their family, life goes on, and they are determined to survive. They currently live in a tent in a refugee camp, and are tightly connected to one another, each one doing what they can to make life better for the others. The Alhaddad children share tasks and do their part between cleaning, cooking, making fire, gathering water, and ensuring basic necessities.
The girls are looking for work and have attempted to start a project selling homemade food products. The eldest son works in a biscuit factory, and the youngest son helps his sisters with whatever tasks they give him. Together, they wait for the moment they can return home and recall the pleasant memories of the days when their mother, father, and brother were still alive.
