The Electronic Intifada 26 June 2024
Amid Israel’s indiscriminate bombing, paramedics have struggled to reach the injured. Here, a wounded person is loaded onto an ambulance in Rafah on 7 October, 2023.
APA imagesIt was the night of 16 October 2023. After a loud explosion, my mother’s phone started ringing incessantly. The caller was my sister Alaa. The explosion had happened in the house adjacent to hers.
She told us that the three-storey house had turned into rubble and was being consumed by fire.
Many months later, I spoke to Hala Ammar, a dentistry student, who lived there.
What follows is her account of what happened in that house on that night.
In the 2021 war, a lot of people were killed in what has become known as the al-Wihda Street massacre. This took place near the backyard of the house I lived in.
I’d heard the news of the martyrdom of our neighbors and friends from the Abu al-Ouf family. Since 2021, I have been thinking about how the survivors of this massacre might have felt and how they had managed to survive under the rubble.
Then on 13 October 2023, the evacuation of the northern Gaza Strip was announced.
I stood at the window of my bedroom crying. My feeling at that moment was that I would not see my street again, and I would not be able to sit in my room. I was very scared, feeling that something bad would happen, but I couldn’t specify what it would be.
Three days later at 9 p.m. our house was targeted directly. Everything became dark. I couldn’t understand what was happening, and I couldn’t open my eyes because of the dust and rubble.
At that moment, I wished I had asked my friends, the survivors of the al-Wihda Street massacre, what it felt like to be under the rubble?
Am I under the rubble or above it, I wondered
At first, I didn’t realize that my house had been bombed. I struggled to speak, hoping someone would hear me. I thought the bombing might have been targeted at a crossroads near the house.
I stood up, moved a little and turned on my smartphone’s flashlight. Around me I saw the ruins of the house, debris, smoke, dust and bodies.
Trying to save mother
For half an hour I tried to help rescue those injured.
I saw my mother, my friend and companion. I saw limbs scattered around me. I had studied anatomy during my first academic year so I knew what I was looking at.
I was in a state of shock from the horror and cruelty of the scene.
I was standing in a pool of my mother’s blood, hoping she would try to survive for my sake.
Her limbs were gone, but she was conscious, trying to breathe her last breath. She asked me for water, but the water was cut off from the house tanks.
I couldn’t walk well because of the rubble and stones.
I reached the refrigerator to get my mother water. My older brother sat next to her, trying to keep her conscious. We got her water and washed her face. She said to me softly, “Hala, I can’t feel my feet!”
My brother lifted her head up so she wouldn’t see what she was missing. And I said to her: “Mom, your limbs are here, don’t worry, just stay awake.”
Then I went down to the street – three times– trying to get an ambulance for my mother.
The first paramedic fell into a rocket crater and couldn’t get out. The second held an injured person on the stairs and didn’t make it to me.
I went down a third time. My bare feet were burned because of fires that had sprung up in the bombing. I was using all my last energy. I ran quickly from one paramedic to another. The last paramedic grabbed me and put me in the ambulance and closed the door. The ambulance felt like a grave.
The paramedic saw that I was covered in blood. I said to him, “I swear, it’s not my blood, it’s my mother’s blood, she’s alive up there! Please send someone to bring my mother.”
But no one listened to me.
I continued crying and screaming until a body was placed in the ambulance with me. I lost consciousness then.
When I woke up, I realized that the upper floor of our house had been targeted, and the roof of the house had fallen on us.
Family gone
My beloved father was on the upper floor with my uncles, and my little sister, who had been on her way to give a cup of corn to my brother.
My father, mother, and little sister, along with 20 relatives, were martyred.
The feeling of fear accompanies me now with every step; I sleep while holding my feet because I fear they’ll be severed like my mother’s.
Because the bombing came suddenly without warning, I’m afraid of being separated from my sisters for even a few seconds.
The sadness and pain didn’t stop here. The agony continues. We remain steadfast.
Rifqa Hijazi is a student in Gaza.
