In Gaza, The Anguished Distress Of A Bereaved Father

It was the day of their shared birthday when three-year-old Adam and his sister Sham, 9, were killed along with their mother in an Israeli strike on southern Gaza, their distraught father told AFP

Rafah, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 24th Oct, 2023) It was the day of their shared birthday when three-year-old Adam and his sister Sham, 9, were killed along with their mother in an Israeli strike on southern Gaza, their distraught father told AFP.

Ayman Abu Shamalah says he himself escaped death by a matter of seconds when the strike slammed into a building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

"I was coming down the stairs when the strike happened. If I had come down 30 seconds earlier, I would have been killed with them," he told AFP on Monday, sobbing inconsolably.

It was a Saturday evening and Abu Shamalah had gone up to the roof to check that the water tanks were filling up after they finally got a delivery 11 days after supplies were cut.

The 34-year-old said the family had fled the bombardments in Gaza City to shelter with relatives in Rafah.

But the building where they were staying was hit by Israeli forces, Abu Shamalah says, robbing him of his wife and children, along with four other relatives and two of their children.

Israel began an intensive bombing campaign across Gaza after Hamas militants stormed across the border on October 7, killing more than 1,400 people, mostly civilians, Israeli officials say.

Since then, Gaza's Hamas-controlled health ministry says more than 5,000 people, also mainly civilians, have been killed in the Israeli bombardment, among them 2,000 children.

"They put my son's shattered body in a blue bag. Sham's body was totally burnt," Abu Shamalah said, his voice a strangled sob.

"October 21 was Sham and Adam's birthday and it became the day they died. It will be a very difficult day for me every year," he said

- Nine months pregnant -

His 28-year-old wife Dareen was pregnant, almost full term with their third child, a little girl whom they had decided to call Mecca.

"My wife was hanging out washing on the balcony when the strike happened and the blast threw her from the third floor down to the neighbour's place below."

Rushing down, he found her on the floor.

"I thought she and the baby would be dead after such a fall. I found her lying on the floor but she was still alive.

"Her last words to me were: 'Ayman, take Mecca out of my belly and take care of her'," he whispered.

His wife was so disfigured by the explosion that he only recognised her by "the trousers she was wearing", he says.

In the Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital where her body was taken, he begged the doctor "to save the baby".

"I told him it was her last wish."

The doctors managed to get the baby out by carrying out a Caesarian section, with the tiny newborn urgently rushed to the paediatric unit at the Emirates Red Crescent hospital in Rafah.

- 'Permanent after-effects' -

"The baby was in very serious condition when she was brought here and immediately put onto a ventilator," the hospital's head of emergencies, Mohammad Salameh, told AFP.

"But the initial prognosis doesn't look good because her brain was starved of oxygen between the time of her mother's death and when she was born," he said.

"It is very likely she will suffer permanent after-effects."

Standing in front of his tiny daughter's incubator, Abu Shamalah burst into tears, as a doctor tried to console him.

A name tag on the incubator reads: "Baby of the martyr Dareen Abu Shamalah" with the date of birth October 21 -- the same date on which his other two children were born.

And the date on which they died along with their mother.