‘Mama we’re dying’: Solely in a position to hear her youngsters in Gaza of their remaining days | Israel Warfare on Gaza

Bethlehem, occupied West Financial institution – Hanan al-Qeeq sits subsequent to a hospital mattress in Beit Jala Hospital, her unhappy, pale face seconds away from tears always, even when she tries to muster up a smile of greeting.

Sitting beside the exhausted girl is her husband, Mazen, 56, a Gaza Ministry of Training worker who left his work to return to the occupied West Financial institution, the place their son Fadi is being handled.

Fifty-year-old Hanan says she carries a heavy burden. As she and Mazen stored their vigil by Fadi’s bedside, praying for his therapeutic, Israel’s conflict on Gaza took 4 of their different kids from them.

“What can I say past what occurred?” mentioned Mazen, who didn’t wish to, or maybe couldn’t, converse extra.

The couple had seven kids.

4 daughters: Iman, 31, who’s married and lives in Canada, Malaka, 24, Nuran, 23, and Tala, 15.

Three sons: Fayez, 33, who’s married and lives in the US, Fadi, 30, and Muhammad Awad, 17.

Now they’ve three kids: Fadi, Fayez, and Iman.

As a result of Malaka, Nuran, Muhammad Awad and Tala needed to keep behind when Hanan and Mazen left Gaza for Fadi’s medical care and so they have been killed when Israel bombed the shelter they have been hiding in.

Remembrance of these misplaced

Hanan scrolls by pictures of her kids on her cellphone, one thing she does with a tragic familiarity as she talks about them.

“Malaka was candy and beneficiant, all the time prepared to assist out. Nuran cherished everybody, cherished life, and was cherished in return, particularly by her fiance in Morocco … they have been going to get married after Eid al-Adha.”

As for Tala, their mom mentioned, “I likened her to the Virgin Mary, so calm and delicate, an actual princess. And Muhammad Awad, he labored so exhausting. He had a notice up by his desk reminding himself: ‘I wish to get 97 p.c in the highschool exams so my dad is completely satisfied and I can research engineering abroad.’”

Their bustling, content material household life got here to a screeching halt final April when Fadi plunged 5 storeys whereas at work plastering the outside of a constructing. He grew to become quadriplegic.

Mazen initially accompanied Fadi to Haifa for therapy. He has since been moved from hospital to hospital.

It took months earlier than Hanan was in a position to be part of them; by then the therapy was going down at Tel Aviv’s Reuth Hospital. Hanan was meant to stick with Fadi whereas Mazen returned to Gaza, however she was apprehensive about Fadi and intimidated by coping with the Israeli hospital system, so she requested him to remain.

Little did she know, she mentioned, that by asking him to remain, she would save his life.

The conflict begins

When Israel’s conflict on Gaza started in October, the distraught mother and father have been nonetheless looking for the therapy Fadi wanted. He had been transferred from Haifa to Tel HaShomer Hospital in Tel Aviv, the place he acquired some surgical procedures, however they have been thrown out as a result of they might not afford to finish the therapy there.

Hanan spoke to her kids as usually as she might, listening to them as they trembled on the cellphone in concern, and listening to their screams at any time when a projectile landed close by.

“They’d cry on the cellphone: ‘Mama, we’re dying,’” she mentioned.

“I might attempt to reassure them to inform that it might be over in a number of days, just like the wars earlier than it did. ‘No hurt or hazard will befall you,’ I informed them,” she mentioned, scrubbing tears away from her eyes.

Every week after the conflict began, Hanan’s concern for her kids grew and she or he emailed her sisters to ask them to care for them, writing: “My daughters’ lives are in your fingers. Care for them.”

Her older sister, who goes by Umm Fadi, despatched a automobile to take the kids from Remal in north Gaza to her home in Tal al-Hawa within the southwest.

By then, Hanan’s appeals to Palestinian officers and the neighborhood have been working and she or he managed to get the Palestinian Authority to tackle Fadi’s therapy bills and acquired him admitted to a hospital in Bethlehem by October 20.

The youngsters stayed at their aunt’s home for almost a month, until the Israeli military stormed the neighbourhood and so they fled to az-Zawayda with everybody who was in the home: their aunt, her sons with their wives, her daughters with their husbands, and all their kids.

On December 13, Fadi underwent surgical procedure on the Istishari Hospital in Ramallah earlier than being transferred to Beit Jala Hospital in Bethlehem, the place he’s nonetheless being handled.

All through, Hanan and Mazen have been sleeping in hospital wards and consuming regardless of the hospital gave them till the folks of Bethlehem realized of their plight.

A neighborhood member gave them a furnished home, the couple recounted, and informed them that the home was theirs at some stage in Fadi’s therapy. “We discovered security amongst our folks,” Hanan mentioned.

Whereas Hanan in Bethlehem apprehensive about her kids left behind in Gaza, they apprehensive about their mother and father and requested about their brother Fadi’s well being each time they spoke.

Hanan’s sister and the 29 folks she was with – together with Hanan’s kids – have been heading again to her dwelling in Tal al-Hawa after listening to the Israeli military had withdrawn. So intensive was the injury they left behind that the group had a tough time discovering their method again to the home, the kids informed her on the cellphone.

Simply weeks later, the Israeli military pounced once more, sending the household fleeing to Jalaa, then Remal, and again to Jalaa, the place they ended up sheltering with 200 folks in a college constructing. However the group continued to maneuver from place to put as they sought security, till in the future Hanan heard that 16 kin had been killed in an Israeli assault in Jalaa.

Hanan held on to the opposite finish of the cellphone, sick with fear. She almost misplaced her thoughts when the kids’s telephones have been off, however she heard from her niece Sahar that each one was effectively and finally the surviving household was in a position to go away as soon as once more to Tal al-Hawa.

“Think about what it was like,” Hanan mentioned, scrolling sadly by the pictures, “to have Malaka inform me: ‘Mama, we can be martyred. Don’t cry if that occurs. I might slightly that than us be paralysed or lose our limbs.’”

Then she misplaced contact with them for days, perhaps per week. Hanan misplaced depend as she desperately tried to get by to anybody who may know what was taking place. On the final night time of her search, she didn’t sleep, up all night time sending message after message to Malaka.

Hanan and Mazen had reached out to the ICRC and the Palestine Purple Crescent Society, begging them to go to the home and test on the kids. However Hanan didn’t realise that that they had a solution till she walked into Fadi’s hospital room in the future and noticed a gaggle of docs and employees ready for her.

One of many girls within the group began gently asking her questions, however one thing informed her there was one more reason for his or her presence.

“I requested: ‘Have you ever acquired something? My kids, has one thing occurred to them? Had been they martyred?’

“I noticed tears of their eyes, and certainly one of them answered, she was carrying a Purple Crescent uniform: ‘I might have cherished to let you know that they weren’t martyred, however that is God’s will.’

The emergency companies had lastly gotten to the home on December 21, 2023, to search out that everybody there had been killed about three days prior.

“I stood there in the course of the room, begging them: ‘OK, inform me, who was martyred? Who’s nonetheless alive? Malaka? Tutu [Tala]? Muhammad?’

“She replied that everybody had been martyred, that that they had been discovered beneath the rubble.

“I began screaming, simply screaming, till I collapsed of their midst.”

Hanan had been engaged on getting the household out of Gaza earlier than Fadi’s accident. Painstakingly, she acquired the kids’s passports and was ready for the conflict to cease so they might journey, however it was all in useless now.

“My kids … my kids! They have been ready for his or her brother Fadi to get well and for us to return,” she wept.

Now, she doesn’t wish to return to Gaza in any respect.

“No, I’ve neither folks nor stones left there. The home has collapsed and my kids have been martyred. To whom will I return?

“Everybody has gone and my kids [and] my sister have been martyred, so a lot of my kin.”