The elderly Palestinian woman, Fathia Al-Shami, sits in front of her small tent that shelters her, after her displacement from Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, after being taken out from under the rubble of her house that was bombed by the Israeli occupation.
The elderly woman, who has reached the age of 80, complains of the hardship and difficulty of the situation, but despite that, she affirms that she remains steadfast on her land and refuses to be displaced.
The woman said in an exclusive interview with Tel Aviv Tribune: “If the whole world comes, we will not leave our land. If not me, then my son’s son and all my descendants will live. I want to die in my land, and I will remain here forever despite all the destruction and bombing.”
The elderly woman adds about her living situation after moving to live in a tent: “I am a praying woman and I am 80 years old. I stop praying. I cannot find a bathroom to go to or a place to perform ablution in. I cannot find food to eat or a blanket to cover myself with. We live in a tent on the street.”
She continued with poignant words: “There is no one with us. The Palestinian people are defeated. We have no one but God. But I will not leave my house, and I do not want to leave. Neither death nor humiliation.”
In recent weeks, Israeli calls to displace Palestinians have emerged, and yesterday, Wednesday, a local Palestinian official said that the number of displaced people who arrived in the city of Rafah, located in the far south of the Gaza Strip, has reached about one million since the beginning of the Israeli war on the seventh of last October.
The ongoing Israeli aggression against Gaza for 90 days led to the death of 22,313 martyrs, the injury of 57,296 others, most of whom were children and women, the destruction of a large part of the Strip and a humanitarian disaster for its population of 2.3 million people.