“Hold your family close every night, hoping it won’t be the last time.”
Because the Jews are coming!!!
My siblings and I lived in a three-story house in Khan Younis. We stayed in it despite the bombing and explosions we heard around us from the actions of the Israeli military. There were 28 people in the house, including five women, 18 children and five men.
Around 9 am on 5 December 2023, we were surrounded by a barrage of gunfire, so we ran to the basement. We realized that Israeli soldiers had stormed the house when we heard voices speaking in Hebrew and gunshots in the upper apartments.
The soldiers continued firing for 15 minutes. As the gunfire inside the house intensified and the sound of explosions surrounded us, the women started screaming and the children crying. The Israeli occupation forces realized people were in the basement due to the sounds, so they descended and started firing in the basement.
My eldest brother began shouting loudly in English: “We have children and women.”
One of the soldiers responded in English: “How many of you are there?”
At that moment, a soldier who spoke Arabic ordered us to come out with our hands raised, with women and children exiting first. The women and children were placed in a room on the ground floor.
Interrogation
My four brothers and I were put under the staircase. Our hands were tied in front of us with plastic cuffs, and our eyes were blindfolded with cloth. There were at least 20 soldiers. They put me in the basement bathroom, bound and blindfolded, and sat me on a bathroom stool.
When the soldiers took me into the bathroom, they slapped me in the face and told me to shut up. They removed my shirt, leaving me in my pants.
A soldier started interrogating me about personal information and work. He used a laptop and asked me where rockets were launched from and the locations of tunnels. The interrogation lasted more than an hour.
Afterward, Israeli soldiers took me to my apartment on the first floor, removed the blindfold and began breaking and destroying the furniture in my children’s rooms and shooting at the TV screen, betting on who could hit it. I saw my brother bleeding from his face and hands from the Israeli soldiers’ assault.
A soldier asked where my ID and phone were, and I said with the officer downstairs. At that moment, I heard women and children screaming.
They took me from the first floor to the ground floor, where I saw my 15-year-old daughter. I asked why she was screaming, and she said they had taken most of our phones, gold, a laptop and money. The soldier pulled her inside and told her to be silent. They took me to the basement bathroom, where I stayed for about three hours, hearing my siblings’ screams as they were beaten by Israeli soldiers.
At around 6 pm, they took three of my brothers and me outside the house. Through the blindfold, I saw that the surrounding land had been bulldozed and was unrecognizable. The officer informed me that we would be arrested. They loaded us into an armored vehicle, which drove for about an hour to a military site.
Repeated abuse
There, a man in an Israeli military uniform who spoke fluent Arabic introduced himself, saying we were in Kerem Shalom. He removed my pants, leaving me in my boxers, and whispered in my ear, “I will make sure you never forget my name.” He tightened the plastic cuffs on my wrists until they bled and began kicking and punching me, slapping my face, cursing and using obscene language.
Feeling intense pain and needing to urinate, I asked the soldier for permission to use the bathroom, but he refused and told me to urinate on myself, which I did. When he saw this, the soldier urinated on me. He continued beating me severely throughout the night until dawn with his feet and slaps. It was the worst and most difficult night of my life.
The next morning, the Israeli soldiers transported us by bus with other detainees to another military site. I spent 23 days in detention, undergoing seven rounds of interrogation.
I was released on the morning of 28 December 2023 and started my journey to find my family, an extremely difficult task with the Israeli army occupying Khan Younis. Friends informed me that their last contact with them had been two weeks earlier, after which communication was lost entirely, and no one knew anything about them.
I searched and asked about them for more than a month until I learned that the house we all lived in was bombed, and they were martyred.
Finally, on the morning of 8 April, after the Israeli army withdrew from Khan Younis, I could at last go to the house. It was a pile of rubble from the bombing by Israeli aircraft.
When I tried to enter the basement, I couldn’t bear the smell of blood and the sight of my decomposed dead relatives. I called civil defense, but they didn’t come due to a lack of equipment and the presence of a lot of martyrs in the streets.
Recovering the martyrs
On the morning of 9 April, we began recovering the martyrs. We were searching with simple tools such as a hammer. On the first day, we recovered the decomposed bodies of five martyrs, who were identified by their clothes.
After that, the search and recovery of the remaining martyrs continued for seven days, and we were able to recover 19 martyrs. The last recovered was my son, who was 4 years old. Due to the extent of decomposition, only his bones and clothes remained, and we buried him in the grave of one of our martyrs.
The remains of all the martyrs (a total of 24, including five women and 17 children, nine of them girls) were about 80 percent decomposed and could only be identified by their clothes.
Can you imagine being in the embrace of your family one day and in the hands of your enemy the next, enduring constant torture without knowing when it will end?
Wondering:
Will I live?
Will I see my family again?
What happened to them?
Here in Gaza, you live amid loss, pain and suffering.
You hold your family close every night, hoping it won’t be the last time.
Dr. Areej Hijazi is an obstetrician in Gaza.
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