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 lady is her husband, Mazen, 56, a Gaza Ministry of Schooling worker who left his work to come back 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 saved their vigil by Fadi’s bedside, praying for his therapeutic, Israel’s warfare on Gaza took 4 of their different kids from them.
“What can I say past what occurred?” stated Mazen, who didn’t need to, or maybe couldn’t, communicate 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 USA, 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 they usually have been killed when Israel bombed the shelter they have been hiding in.
Remembrance of these misplaced
Hanan scrolls by images of her kids on her telephone, one thing she does with a tragic familiarity as she talks about them.
“Malaka was candy and beneficiant, at all times 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 stated, “I likened her to the Virgin Mary, so calm and smooth, an actual princess. And Muhammad Awad, he labored so exhausting. He had a notice up by his desk reminding himself: ‘I need to get 97 % in the highschool exams so my dad is completely happy and I can examine 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 capable of be a part of them; by then the therapy was happening at Tel Aviv’s Reuth Hospital. Hanan was meant to stick with Fadi whereas Mazen returned to Gaza, however she was anxious about Fadi and intimidated by coping with the Israeli hospital system, so she requested him to remain.
Little did she know, she stated, that by asking him to remain, she would save his life.
The warfare begins
When Israel’s warfare on Gaza started in October, the distraught dad and mom 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 may not afford to finish the therapy there.
Hanan spoke to her kids as usually as she may, listening to them as they trembled on the telephone in worry, and listening to their screams each time a projectile landed close by.
“They’d cry on the telephone: ‘Mama, we’re dying,’” she stated.
“I’d attempt to reassure them to inform that it might be over in a couple of days, just like the wars earlier than it did. ‘No hurt or hazard will befall you,’ I informed them,” she stated, scrubbing tears away from her eyes.
Every week after the warfare began, Hanan’s worry for her kids grew and he or she emailed her sisters to ask them to maintain them, writing: “My daughters’ lives are in your palms. Maintain them.”
Her older sister, who goes by Umm Fadi, despatched a automotive 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 he or she managed to get the Palestinian Authority to tackle Fadi’s therapy bills and received 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 they usually 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 during Fadi’s therapy. “We discovered security amongst our folks,” Hanan stated.
Whereas Hanan in Bethlehem anxious about her kids left behind in Gaza, they anxious about their dad and mom 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 house in Tal al-Hawa after listening to the Israeli military had withdrawn. So in depth was the harm they left behind that the group had a tough time discovering their method again to the home, the kids informed her on the telephone.
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 telephone, 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 nicely and finally the surviving household was capable of go away as soon as once more to Tal al-Hawa.
“Think about what it was like,” Hanan stated, scrolling sadly by the images, “to have Malaka inform me: ‘Mama, we will likely be martyred. Don’t cry if that occurs. I’d moderately that than us be paralysed or lose our limbs.’”
Then she misplaced contact with them for days, possibly every week. Hanan misplaced rely as she desperately tried to get by to anybody who may know what was occurring. 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 Pink Crescent Society, begging them to go to the home and examine on the kids. However Hanan didn’t realise that they’d a solution till she walked into Fadi’s hospital room in the future and noticed a bunch of docs and employees ready for her.
One of many ladies within the group began gently asking her questions, however one thing informed her there was another excuse 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 one in all them answered, she was carrying a Pink Crescent uniform: ‘I’d have cherished to inform you 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 they’d been discovered below 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 received the kids’s passports and was ready for the warfare to cease so they may journey, but it surely was all in useless now.
“My kids … my kids! They have been ready for his or her brother Fadi to recuperate and for us to return,” she wept.
Now, she doesn’t need 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.”