6/1/2024–|Last updated: 1/6/202410:49 PM (Mecca time)
Rami Awad spent days looking for a tent to take his family to a camp in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, but he was unable to find one, before the apartment in which he was staying with his family in Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, was exposed to an Israeli bombing that killed him, along with his wife and two of his children. And some of his relatives on Saturday morning.
But his third son, Mahmoud (11 years old), survived the Israeli bombing, because he spent that night at his uncle’s house. By this morning, he went to the European Hospital morgue, where his parents and two brothers were lying on metal shelves, wrapped in shrouds.
Mahmoud, surrounded by other children listening to him in silence, said, “My mother told me: Go and sleep tonight at your uncle Issa’s house. So I slept at my uncle Issa’s house. They bombed the house (where the family was staying).”
He added, speaking calmly and taking quick breaths as if he was trying to suppress crying, “My brothers were martyred. My father, Rami Awad, my younger brother in the second grade, my older brother Moaz in the eighth grade, and my mother.”
There were other family members in the morgue, including a young girl with injuries to her face, and a number of women who were surrounding her and hugging her, all of them crying.
Displacement from a refugee camp
Before the war, the Awad family lived in the Beach Camp, west of Gaza City, which housed Palestinians displaced from their lands in 1948, and then housed their children and grandchildren after them.
Mahmoud said, “We were in Al-Shati camp, and the Israeli army dropped leaflets” stating that Gaza was a war zone. “So we fled to Khan Yunis on the basis that it was safe, and they bombed us as well.”
The child’s family was living with relatives on the mother’s side who lived in 3 apartments in the city of Khan Yunis.
Muhammad, the uncle of the child who lost his family, said, “By God, they were sure they would survive, but they were bombed while they were sleeping in the houses… My only brother spent 5 days roaming the land from east to west for a tent. They started to go to the west of Rafah. This is his share.”
Mohamed added while shedding tears, “I don’t know what to say. I can’t.”
For 92 days, the Israeli occupation army has launched an aggression against Gaza, leaving – as of Saturday – 22,722 martyrs and 58,166 injured, most of them children and women, massive destruction of infrastructure and an “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe,” according to official Palestinian and UN sources.