“The hospital room was dark. Six heavily armed soldiers with blinding headlamps and two vicious dogs gathered around me. I was on the bed, with the bones in my feet shattered and my body riddled with fragments. Beside me were Abboudi and Hammoudi, my two children. All my thoughts were focused on the question, how do I protect them now?”, says 33-year-old Azza. She, along with her two boys, were blockaded in Gaza’s Nasser Hospital in mid-February 2024, after a long, impossible journey of survival amidst the genocide. This was the moment of confrontation between her and the Israeli occupation’s soldiers.

 

Before this confrontation, Azza had gone through an indescribable ordeal trying to escape with her children from the Israeli genocide. In every decision she made, her only concern was to protect her children.

 

Azza, a Palestinian woman and mother of five-year-old twins Muhammad and Abdallah (Hammoudi and Abboudi, as she affectionately calls them) only got to know Gaza approximately ten years ago, when she married a man from the strip. She was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, where her family lived before eventually moving back to Gaza. Amidst the war, she found herself bearing full responsibility for her children’s safety alone as her husband, Ahmad, was responsible for a large tent for displaced people in al-Satr al-Gharbi, Khan Younis, by virtue of his humanitarian work. The mother has a special relationship with her two children, whom she only bore after five years of medical treatments. She was raising them, playing with them, and tackling the challenge of striking a balance between pampering them and being stern. The war brought a new challenge: staying alive.

 

On October 1, the family moved to a bigger house with a large play area. But with the war, the journey of displacement began. Azza made one decision after another in search of the impossible, trying in vain to protect her boys and find them a few meters of safety somewhere across the Palestinian coastal strip. From her house in Nuseirat to her family’s house in Khan Younis to her husband’s tent in Fifth Street to the schools sheltering displaced people in Nuseirat and Rafah, she tried everything. But wherever she went, the hell of Israel’s comprehensive killing of the inhabitants awaited her. Fear grew in her heart. Even after the family was targeted and she was hospitalized with severe wounds, the bombing and siege followed her, culminating in the occupation’s soldiers overrunning the hospital.

 

Being hit by an Israeli airstrike is an inescapable fate – where can the people flee from the monster pursuing them and blockading them by air, land, and sea? And becoming wounded is the only means whereby a family might free itself from the jaws of this savagery – a means that only exists thanks to the efforts of medical and humanitarian organizations working to extract but a few of the wounded in the face of abundant obstacles. Had Azza not been wounded, she would never have been allowed to leave. Today, she rests in Beirut. She came with her two boys as part of the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund project to transport and treat wounded children and the adults accompanying them. In this article, we are continuing the “Witnesses to Genocide” series by documenting her testimony and writing her story and personal via dolorosa.

 

October 1

The family moved to a new house in Nuseirat, northern Gaza Strip, just one week before the war began. “It was a house on the roof with a space in front for the children to play. I was planning to install swings for them,”, says Azza. Hence, from the outset, the mother was preoccupied with creating spaces for her children to play.

 

The family’s problems were very mundane, even pleasant in the mother’s recollection. “We were far removed from politics because I grew up outside of the strip. We kept to ourselves, and even our connections were limited,”, says Azza. That would change when the genocidal war began.

 

In the early days of the war, “The bombing wouldn’t subside day or night. Because we were on the sixth floor, the house wouldn’t stop shaking”. Azza’s talk of “fear” and even panic begins with the closing-in of Israel’s indiscriminate killing: “I began losing people. The owner of the store was martyred. The shop at the end of the market was destroyed and its owner and her children martyred. I began to fear”. On October 13, her mother convinced her to flee “because the groceries had begun to run out and leaving the kids alone while I searched for food would be unsafe”. She made a decision: “I left with a small suitcase containing some books, two toys for the children, and a small collection of clothing, thinking that the trip would be temporary”.

 

The flight to Khan Younis was the second of Azza’s decisions, having decided earlier to hold out and then stuck to that decision for five days. In both cases, “My concern was my two children and how to protect them”.

 

A Succession of Impossible Decisions

The situation in Khan Younis was difficult for Azza: “There was no food. The food pantries were empty. My brothers were sleeping three days in the street in order to fill a small gas bottle for cooking. We would be out since the morning touring the mosques in search of electricity to charge our phones. The house was small, and the family is large”.

 

During this period, the cold began to worsen, and seeing her sons shivering was more than Azza could stand, despite the death surrounding them. The mother exploited the few daytime hours that the occupation army had set for Gazans to leave the north and walked with her boys to Nuseirat, against the direction of displacement at that time. She had only one goal: “to bring winter clothes for the kids”. She arrived in Nuseirat in the evening, and things were quiet. She asked the people there about the situation. “Quiet, and the neighborhood is packed with displaced people,” they responded. She adds, “The area was devoid of resistance fighters and far away from the fighting hotspots”. Because of the late hour and her assessment of the situation, she slept in her home, which the family missed.

 

“At 11:30 at night, I heard the terrifying noise of a plane, and the entire building shook. Then it began bombing. It targeted our neighbors. I panicked, and I couldn’t comprehend the situation or bear the responsibility of two children between my arms while the first floors of the building were on fire. The door leading to the balcony was blown open by the explosion and almost fell on us. At that moment, our neighbors were trapped behind their door and began shouting. I don’t know how, but God granted me the strength to remove the door”. Azza rescued her neighbors from the fire while carrying her two children. The path out of the home was surrounded by fire and burning bodies. Among them she saw the faces of neighbors and the body of a child the same age as her sons. She felt like his gaze was following her as she fled the fire.

 

“I was terrified like never before,” Azza says.

 

The young mother decided to head to a school sheltering displaced persons in the hope that it would be safe. In the morning, she paid NIS500 [USD135] – all the money she possessed – for a car to take her to Khan Younis. Although the sum was enormous, “I felt it was the cost of saving our lives”.

 

“Where Do We Go?”

Azza delivered the winter clothes that she had managed to take, which smelled of death and fire, to her family’s house and continued on to Rafah in search of safe areas: “From morning to night, I was going from one school to another, but I couldn’t find a single one that could take us in. In the end, the driver told me that he was returning to Khan Younis, so I decided to go back with him and stay in my family’s house”.

 

Azza originally went to Rafah based on a suggestion by her husband, who had erected his relief tent adjacent to a school at the end of Fifth Street. Azza was anxious about the location: “It’s a street known for the fact that half of it was under the Zionists’ control”. Later, Azza risked heading to her husband’s tent: “My husband told me to come to him, so I headed there intending to tell him that we would come to the tent. I rode a donkey-drawn cart driven by a wounded man. I didn’t notice his injury initially, but he had been wounded by the bombing near the school where my husband was. I realized that when we arrived there”.

 

Azza adds, “When I arrived, the bombing was severe and indiscriminate. Bombs and shells were falling everywhere. Terror gripped me. I asked the driver, ‘Did you know that the area is like this? Why did you bring me here?’. I was forced to turn back halfway, and when we arrived in the middle of Khan Younis, I felt a certain relief. I called my husband and told him, ‘I was coming to you to tell you about my decision to move to the tent, but I couldn’t even see you because of the surrounding bombing’”.

Azza sums up the whole story of homelessness and displacement by returning to the question, “Where do we go?”, which has characterized Gazans’ lives since the war began. “The most terrifying thing,” she says, “was that there was no safe area. In Nuseirat the situation was very frightening, and it was no better in Khan Younis. In Rafah, it was apocalyptic”.

 

The Massacre Reaches Us

Azza’s failed attempt to reach her husband’s tent occurred in the week leading up to the night of December 24 – the night of the airstrike. “The day we were bombed was an ordinary one. We were sifting wheat to make flour because there was none in the city,” Azza says. In the evening, the internet returned after a week-long outage, so she went down to tell her family: “I didn’t spend time with them. My heart was pounding, and I felt inside that something bad was going to happen”. She laid out her bedding, and her two children came to sleep on her legs, as they do every night. “But that night, I pushed them away, and that was a mercy from God,” she explains. She laid out a separate bed for her kids. “Unusually, I decided to call my sister,” Azza continues; “She sensed that I was scared and confused, so she said to me, ‘Azza, entrust yourself and your children to God’s protection’. I told her, ‘I have entrusted them to God’”.

 

Azza held her phone to read the news she had missed while the internet was down. “Suddenly, I saw a big white light. I saw a fragment go straight through my phone, which exploded in my hand. Then I felt an enormous pressure. I felt like I was dead. The pressure was like being in the throes of death. I felt like I was in the moment of death. My failed attempt to shout to people to save me was more terrifying than the wounds themselves. I felt like the rocket lifted me and threw me down again, and then I stopped feeling anything,” she explains.

 

Azza’s siblings on the third floor rushed to help. “When my brother saw me,” Azza says, “he thought I was dead, so he threw a blanket over me and collapsed. My mother went out, saw the people around us, started screaming ‘My children! My children!’, and began searching for us. People came in and extracted me from under the rubble. They pulled me out covered by the blanket as though I was dead because my legs were lifeless. As they put me in the car and pulled Abdallah out, other people were calling out to them to wait because ‘there’s another child missing’. They were talking about my son Muhammad. I could hear them”. Azza, who truly believed she was dead, wanted to halt her own rescue and ask the neighbors to search quickly for Muhammad, but she was unable to do so.

 

On the way to the hospital, Azza summoned what life she had left in her and said, “You must tell my husband, at the end of Fifth Street”. She says that she did not trust anyone else to care for her children after her death. But who would dare travel from one area to another in the dark of night and under bombardment?

 

The Family Reunites

Azza arrived at the hospital and found that the neighbors had already brought Muhammad, having found him under a partially collapsed wall. The stones of the same wall had crushed her father, whose body was found in pieces, but she was not told that he had been martyred. Nobody wanted to break her heart while she was in the state she was in. The following morning, her husband happened to come to the area to deliver some medicines for the children, fearing that they would become unavailable. When he reached his family’s street, people began telling him, “Thank God you allguys are safe”. He did not understand why they were addressing him in this manner until someone told him, “Your children were wounded and are in hospital”. He began shouting in disbelief.

 

When he reached the hospital, he was a ball of rage. Once he had absorbed the shock, the doctors allowed him to enter the room. He was shouting at the top of his lungs demanding that his wife be admitted to the operating theater. His wife had a gash in her back, fragments had disfigured her face and were embedded throughout her body, and her feet had been crushed and resembled two pieces of smashed, bloody meat. Today, her treatment continues in Beirut. She needs bone reconstruction in her feet and an artificial joint implanted in her knee.

 

In Nasser Hospital the day after the injury, Azza spent seven hours undergoing surgery. When she awoke, she discovered her son Abdallah among the many wounded with her in the same room: “He was calling to me continuously, ‘Mama, where are you?’. I was beside him, but neither could I turn to see him nor could he turn to see me”. As for Muhammad, he had suffered a broken and dislocated foot and lost two centimeters of height. The injuries affect his walking today. He will need more surgeries once he becomes an adult and his bones mature.

 

 

In the days following the attack and before Azza’s mother and siblings fled to Rafah, they were visiting her for just five minutes at a time: “They couldn’t bear to stay with me more than a few minutes because I was so disfigured”.

On her second day in the hospital, Azza struggled to breathe, and the oxygen apparatus could not ease her feeling of suffocation. She asked the nurses to take her bed out of the room for a while so that she could catch her breath. Outside, she saw her other son, Abboudi, moaning in pain: “The wounds in his head were deep, but because he was the least injured among us, he was alone. My heart sank into a terrible sense of anguish for the boy. I said, ‘God help him, how can a child bear all this?’”.

 

Azza falls silent for a moment and then says in a heartbroken tone, “I tried the best I could to protect the children. I’m not important – the only important thing is that the children are protected and in a safe area”. At this moment, the mother’s tears begin pouring out for the first time during our interviews with her, despite the harshness and bitterness of everything she has already narrated. Azza faces the fact that her efforts did not spare her kids from the brutality of the genocide, and she blames herself.

 

A Siege Followed by a Raid

The family remained in Nasser Hospital, and when the occupation forces began encircling it on January 22, the food and fuel started running out. News of patients dying because of the electricity outage and patients and displaced people being martyredkilled by snipers and artillery began to spread. In mid-February, when the occupation’s orders to evacuate in phases came, the father refused out of fear for his children. Azza was immobile, and he was, like any Palestinian, at risk of being arrested while leaving. The procedures imposed on the people leaving, including the children, involved walking in a long single file without turning or making any movement. Hence, the father would lose his sons in the chaos of the war outside the hospital walls, especially if he was arrested. But when the Israelis raided the hospital, he acquiesced. He took his two children’s hands and set out in fear while Azza remained alone on the bed. Two hours after they left, the soldiers arrested the father, and the two children returned alone. They told Azza that the soldiers stripped them and their father and subjected him, in front of their eyes, to a humiliating search.

 

That was the last time that Azza and her children saw Ahmad, their father and husband. His fate remains unknown. After the Israelis departed, mass graves were found in the hospital’s yard. Azza struggles to remember the color of the clothing Ahmad was wearing when he left, “Perhaps because I was exhausted or perhaps because I don’t want to believe that he might be dead. When they sent me a picture of a body that they thought was likely to be my husband’s, I kept examining the skeleton, which was wearing a blue sweater that I didn’t recognize. I don’t remember what he was wearing at all”.

 

Back to the Moment of Confrontation

The day after Ahmad’s arrest, the soldiers stormed the patients’ rooms. They searched bathrooms, broke down doors, and then began pulling patients out one after another. They did not discriminate among anyone – even the children were handcuffed. They took many of the men, and screams filled the hospital. One man was severely tortured in a neighboring room. His otherworldly cries for help were terrifying.

 

Azza felt fear invading her from all sides. She ordered her two sons to stay by her bed, and in came the soldiers. All the events had led up to this moment with which we began our story: a mother and two children opposite six soldiers and two dogs. For five months, she had tried to protect her children via all means available, but in that moment, who would protect whom? The answer was clear in Azza’s mind: she is their mother, she protects her children, and she would resist her injuries and incapacity to safeguard them. Yet her tongue betrayed her. When they asked her for her name, no words came out: “I knew that if I said nothing, they might shoot me, beat me, or drag me out, but I couldn’t talk. The situation was so frightening that I didn’t know how to say my own name. I remained silent. I tried as hard as I could to talk, but I didn’t know how”.

After the question, along with threats and insults, had been repeated, the silence was only broken by a whisper from Abboudi: “Her name is Azza”.

In that critical moment, the child has risen to the task of protection. He protected his mother after she had spent months trying to protect him from the Israeli barbarity that had rapidly devoured the Gaza Strip. Perhaps it is an irony, or perhaps it is a natural result of the human instinct that not even a child lacks.

The soldiers continued their show of force by smashing the room’s toilet, binding a paralyzed man and several children, and dragging away others whose fate remains unknown. Then they left.

 

On Blame and the Impossibility of Survival

The blame that Azza places on herself is the harshest part of her story. She divulges that she saw, in the looks that even the people closest to her gave her, a kind of blame for failing her mission. The issue is that this mission was impossible. This fact reveals the most terrifying aspect of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. A mother cannot stand alone in the face of a military operation designed to crush the Palestinian community, to which she and her boys belong. The family’s “crime”, which it carried along wherever it turned in Gaza, was simply being Palestinian. In this context, even fleeing seems futile and pointless.

 

The ironies continue. Azza spent months fleeing, yet today, after her brother offered to bring her to the United States, where he lives, she has refused and chosen Beirut. Her family suggested she return to Saudi Arabia or go to Jordan, but she also refused. Coming to Beirut was another decision she made thinking about her children: “I want our journey to be temporary, and I want to go back with them to Gaza”. Azza, who came as a stranger to the Gaza Strip ten years ago, today says that, “A strange connection has arisen between Gaza and me during this war. I have lost my husband and my house, and I have absolutely nothing material left there, but for the first time, I feel like I left something there for which I must return”.

 

Azza is aware of the futility of flight amidst the genocide. In her eyes, we see great, frightening anger, but that anger is very sincere and natural. Her eyes spark with this anger, but they retain their purity and innocence – perhaps the innocence of a very human anger, or the anger of that innocence. “I’m going back to Gaza,” she says; “I have my right, and my husband and children have their right, to Gaza… I have a vendetta there”.

 

This article is an edited translation from Arabic.