19-year-old from a-Shuja’iyeh neighborhood in Gaza City, mother to a toddler, whose home was destroyed in an air strike
I have a daughter who’s two years and seven months old. Her name is Batul. For the past four years, we’ve been renting a two-story house owned by the ‘Adas family, together with my 19-year-old sister Walaa’s family. She’s married to my husband’s brother.
On Tuesday, 9 May 2023, we had power, so I washed our clothes, and then I went into the bedroom and sat on the bed. My husband was out, at his parents’, and my baby was sleeping next to me in the bed. I was reading the news on my phone, and suddenly the wall of the room fell on the bed, right where I was sitting. The power went out. There was no warning before that.
I couldn’t see anything because I was under rubble and rocks. Batul cried, and I told her: “Don’t cry; I’m next to you.” I couldn’t move. I felt like I was in the middle of a nightmare. I tried to get the rocks off of me, but I couldn’t. I started screaming: “Help me! Help me!” My sister’s husband came and asked where I was because he couldn’t see me under the rubble. I told him: “I’m not important; the most important thing is Batul; get her out.” I wanted to see her one last time before I died, so I tried again to get the rocks off of me. Then neighbors came and picked up a concrete pillar that had fallen on me.
They took me and Batul out and sat us in the living room of the house. There were no ambulances, but I saw fire trucks. There was a fire in our neighbor’s house, the al-Bahtini family, whose house is right next to us. I heard the neighbors saying that occupation planes had bombed their house and that Khalil al-Bahtini was martyred along with his wife and daughter Hajar. After that, I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was at my parents’ house, which is close to mine. I had burns on my body and shrapnel in my right hand and right shoulder and bruises all over my body. I also had minor scratches on my neck and head.
My parents called an ambulance, but an hour went by, and it still hadn’t arrived. I realized a lot of people had been injured. My brother called a taxi, and I went with my sisters to a-Shifaa Hospital, where I stayed for two days and then returned to my husband’s parents’ house. Today, a week later, we rented another house.
It’s impossible to live in our house anymore. It has become a ruin, a pile of rocks. All the furniture was buried under the rubble, and some of it was burned. The most badly damaged part of the house was my room, where we kept all of our clothes. The house where we live now has no furniture. My daughter cries a lot. She covers her ears. Her cousin Muhammad, my sister’s son, who is two years and seven months old, also behaves like this. They scream: “There is fire, there is fire.” My sister Walaa was nine months pregnant when the bombing happened. Suddenly, she couldn’t feel her legs and almost suffocated. They put her on a ventilator and connected her to oxygen at the hospital. Her husband also had a very hard time. His legs were injured, and he had shrapnel. He tried to rescue us on his own after the bombing but couldn’t manage it until the neighbors came and helped us.
When I was at the hospital, my sister Safaa (26) told me that my neighbors’ daughters Daniyah and Iman ‘Adas were martyred. That made me very sad and I cried a lot . What did they do? What did I do? Why are we bombed without warning and at night when we are sleeping? We didn’t do anything.
I’ve been having a very tough time emotionally since the bombing. I live in anxiety; I can’t sleep, and I’ve lost my appetite. I constantly replay the bombing and what happened in my mind. I keep thinking about my room, my clothes and my daughter’s clothes. I feel like I’m hallucinating things. At night, I dream that the wall is falling on me and that I’m getting the rocks off of me. I’m afraid to hold my cell phone because I was holding it when our house was bombed.
Why are they scaring us and our children? I came out from under the rubble and couldn’t believe I was alive. I didn’t even go back to the house to see what happened to it. I don’t have the strength to go there. I’m even afraid to go to the street where we were bombed.
Testimony given to B'Tselem Field Researcher Olfat al-Kurd on 18 May 2023.