Gaza- The last time Fatima Hassouna walked around the house where the bodies of her five cousins lay under the rubble, she saw wheat growing from the rubble due to the rainwater, and she cried bitterly.
The scene was “strangely contradictory,” she said. The wheat was bought by her uncle, Mohammed, to grind to feed his children, who were suffering from the Israeli starvation policy. But the children were killed before they could eat the bread, while the grains found their way to life. Since then, Hassouna has been afraid to approach the street where the house is located in the Al-Daraj neighborhood, east of Gaza City.
What increases Hassouna and her family’s pain is that the bodies of the five children, Saadi (13 years old), Basma (11 years old), Duaa (9 years old), Mohammed (7 years old), and Hassan (1 year old), are still under the rubble. Speaking to Tel Aviv Tribune Net, she recalled that the house was bombed on January 13, and was housing three families. Rescue crews were only able to retrieve the remains of four people, out of about 11 martyrs.
Houses with children under them
The failure to retrieve the bodies of martyrs, especially children, leaves deep scars in the memories of thousands of Palestinian families who lost their children for many reasons. The British organization “Save the Children” estimated last Monday that about 21,000 children in Gaza were lost as a result of the Israeli war.
The organization said in a report that many of the missing children are trapped under the rubble, detained in Israeli prisons, buried in unknown graves, or lost from their families.
For the young man Anas Juha, the last Eid al-Adha passed for him in a heavy and sad time, as he looked at the ruins of their house, which contained under its rubble about 60 bodies, including about 35 children. Juha says that he feels “helpless, oppressed, and heartbroken,” due to his inability to bury the bodies of his children. His family, adding, “I can’t sleep thinking about them.”
Juha told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that their five-storey house was bombed on December 6, in the Al-Shaaf neighborhood, east of Gaza City, resulting in the death of 117 of his relatives. Rescue crews were able to extract 57 of them, while the others remained under fire. The rubble, including his two children, Kariman (5 years old) and Fayez (3 years old).
After letting his imagination run wild, trying to recall the names of the child martyrs from his relatives, he began listing the names of those his exhausted memory recalled: “Hala, Ashraf, Yazan, Zain, Kenzi, Al-Mu’tasim Billah, Tala, Jana, Retal, Hanaa, Abeer, Mahmoud, Lama, Sayed.” , Aboud, Warda, Farah, Salah, Asmaa, Baraa, Malik, Riyad…”
In this context, UNICEF spokesman Kazem Abu Khalaf indicated that about 100 children are killed or injured every day in Gaza.
According to the government media office in Gaza, the number of martyrs and missing persons since the beginning of the war on October 7 has reached about 47,600 people, including 15,830 children who were martyred and whose bodies arrived in hospitals.
A barrier between mother and child
The tragedy of children during the war does not stop at their bodies being held under the rubble. There are many who were lost or disappeared in other circumstances, after the occupation separated them from their families, such as what happened to the mother Ilham Al-Harthani, who lost her son Maysara (12 years old) while trying to flee from the north of the Gaza Strip to the south in mid-November.
After a long search, the mother was surprised to find her son in the south of the Strip, while she remained in the north in the town of Jabalia, and the occupation military checkpoint separated them. Al-Harthani said, in a phone call with Tel Aviv Tribune Net, that she was among a crowd that was subjected to shelling in the middle of the Shujaiya neighborhood in eastern Gaza with tank shells and white phosphorus bombs, so she was forced to return to her town, but she lost her son.
After several days of searching, I learned of his presence in the southern Gaza Strip, after a woman named “Amal Eid” embraced him, while the mother who had been widowed for 4 years was unable to join her son in the south, after her family’s house was bombed and all 22 of its residents were martyred, in addition to Because of the martyrdom of her father-in-law, and her care for her crippled mother-in-law.
In the middle of the Strip, Tel Aviv Tribune Net was able to meet Maysara, who still lives with Mrs. Amal Eid and is taking care of him and her children, but he fears not being able to meet his mother and siblings again. He says that he fears – every day – that the occupation army will kill them in its raids, or that he will be killed and not meet his mother again, who is haunted by the same fears after all the pain of loss she has suffered.
helplessness and regret
Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for the Civil Defense Authority in the Gaza Strip, believes that the figures that talk about the loss of 21,000 children are “logical,” especially since “Israel is clearly targeting women and children,” he said.
Basal explains to Tel Aviv Tribune Net that this number includes some of those who are under the rubble, and others who were martyred and buried in mass graves. He says, “The day will come when the details will be revealed after the war ends,” as some of them may have been lost after the occupation separated them from their families, and some of them may be in Israeli prisons.
There is no accurate information available about the children and minors who were arrested by the occupation army during its war on Gaza, which is confirmed by Basal, who says, “The current war conditions prevent us from obtaining an answer about the fate of the children. The exact information will be revealed after the war.”
The Civil Defense spokesman revealed that his agency receives many calls daily from families, urging them to extract the bodies of their children from under the rubble, which it is unable to do due to the loss of capabilities, describing this as a feeling that is “tragic and oppressive at the same time.”
He says, “We apologize to the families and tell them that we are helpless. This is one of the most difficult scenes we face when a mother pleads with us to pull her martyred children from under the rubble, and we are unable to do so.”
Regarding the reasons preventing the recovery of the bodies, Basal says that Israel destroyed 80% of the civil defense capabilities, “there are no mechanisms or capabilities, and if there are mechanisms, there is no fuel to operate them.”