A 44-year-old from Gaza City now in an IDP camp, Sami described taking in his wife’s niece Alma Ja’rur, 11, after she lost her parents and all four siblings in a bombing:
Until the war, I lived with my wife ‘Ula Ja’rur, 35, and our six children in Gaza City. Now we live in a plastic sheet tent in the IDP camp in Rafah. My wife’s niece, Alma, 11, who lost her parents and four siblings on 2 December 2023, lives with us too.
Alma and her family lived on al-Yarmuk Street in Gaza City. On 16 November 2023, when the bombings in the area intensified, they moved to my brother-in-law, Isma’il Ja’rur’s house. It was a five-story building with two apartments on each floor and there were more than a hundred people there from the Kahil, al-Furno, al-’Ashi, Haraz, Habrur and Abu Karsh families.
On 2 December 2023, the building was bombed, and Alma lost her entire family in the bombing: her parents, Muhammad Ghanem Ja’rur, 35, and Na’imah ‘Issa Ja’rur, 38, her sister Rihab, 10, and her three brothers: Ghanem, 14, Kinan, 6, and Tarazan, 18 months old. Alma was trapped under the rubble and rescued after three hours. There are still bodies there that haven’t been removed. More than 40 more people were killed there along with her family.
Alma keeps telling us about the hours she spent under the rubble, how she suddenly found herself like this and screamed and screamed until the Civil Defense found her and rescued her. She was injured in the head and left hand. When they called to tell us this had happened, we had already left our house, and we were in a-Nuseirat R.C. Some people brought her to Rafah that day, and I picked her up there. Words can’t describe the terrible state Alma was in. She cried all the time. When we got to a-Nuseirat, ‘Ula held her the whole time and tried to calm her down.
Alma talks about her family non-stop, about her brothers and sister. She talks about how she saw her brother under the rubble. She keeps asking to go back there to look for her family members under the rubble. We told her there was nothing to go back to. I even took her to a place where you can see the northern Gaza Strip from far away, so she would see the destruction and understand that it’s impossible to go back there right now.
At night, Alma has nightmares, and she keeps waking up crying and screaming. She says she dreams about her family. Every time she hears planes in the sky, she runs to us, scared.
Besides us, all Alma has left is a grandmother and an uncle who are in Germany. We’re trying to get a permit for her to travel to them, in the hopes that she’ll have a better and safer life there. She says she wants to go to get away from the planes and the bombings. She’s having a very difficult time emotionally.
The situation here is terrible overall – disease, lack of food and water, and no electricity. We barely have one or two meals a day, and they’re made up of only legumes and canned food.
* Testimony given to B’Tselem field researcher Olfat al-Kurd on 2 March 2024