What it's like to survive in Gaza when your children are killed Submitted by Ahmed Abu Artema on Mon, 12/22/2025 - 17:19 Through Facebook posts and interviews, four bereaved Palestinian mothers share their stories of unimaginable loss, reflecting a devastation that has spared no home in Gaza A Palestinian mother cradles the body of her daughter Ibtissam Elyan, who was killed when an Israeli air strike hit the family home in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on 25 March 2025 (Bashar Taleb/AFP) Off The human tragedies caused by Israel 's ongoing genocide in Gaza are countless. Nearly two million Palestinians are living through pain and grief, and every family carries its own story of devastation, amid horrific massacres and the destruction of homes. For a mother, the death of a child is a heartbreak that lasts a lifetime. In Gaza, it has reached an unprecedented and unimaginable scale. Death has not come one by one, but in batches. On 24 May, Dr Alaa al-Najjar, a paediatrician, lost nine of her children in a single Israeli air strike. Her home was bombed while she was at work in Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, trying to save the wounded. No words are sufficient to capture what these mothers have endured. Yet some, whose children were killed by Israel, have chosen to share their stories. I bring together the accounts of four mothers, drawn from direct conversations and words they shared publicly on Facebook. Their experiences offer only a glimpse of the overwhelming catastrophe families across Gaza have faced since October 2023. Buried alive The poet Alaa al-Qattrawi lost all four of her children at once, under horrifying circumstances. On 13 December 2023, Alaa was at her family's home in central Gaza, while her children were staying with their father in Khan Younis. When the Israeli army invaded the city and arrested their father, the children were left trapped with their grandmother. Alaa's daughter, Orkida, managed to call her mother, pleading for help. She said they could not leave the house because Israeli snipers were surrounding it. Soon afterwards, Israeli soldiers confiscated the mobile phones in the house, cutting off all contact between Alaa and her children for four months. Israeli soldiers confiscated the mobile phones in the house, cutting off all contact between Alaa and her children for four months Later, news arrived that Israel had destroyed the house where the children had been sheltering. Alaa writes , addressing her daughter Orkida: "I can't imagine that your soft body and your beautiful hair are under the rubble of a three-storey concrete house. I don't want to imagine that. But I still remember your voice before the connection was cut off, telling me that you would wait for me to get you out of there, and that you were taking care of your little sister, Carmel." In April 2024, after the Israeli army withdrew from Khan Younis, the truth was confirmed. The four children had been killed: Yamen, eight; the twins Kinan and Orkida, six; and Carmel, three. Their bodies remained under the rubble for four months, with no one able to reach them. Reflecting on giving birth to her children, Alaa describes the fine surgical stitch left by her caesarean sections. For years, she said, she hardly noticed it. But after losing her children, it became a constant source of pain. Alaa al-Qattrawi with her daughter Orkida, who was killed along with her siblings in an Israeli air strike on their home in Khan Younis in December 2023 (Facebook) She writes : "I would often forget about it. I hardly ever noticed that fine cosmetic thread at all. But now, I feel it and see it often. I can truly look at it, and it has begun to affect me. It hurts my heart, my liver, my soul, and even aches with every breath I take, between inhaling and exhaling. No one ever told me that this fine thread in my body would remind me every minute that you gave birth to a boy, a girl and twins, beautiful children, and then you were left alone." Alaa later addresses her children directly: Before you had notebooks and school bags, a special hairstyle and particular perfumes you loved, coloured pencils and rough drafts, a notebook for notes and a secret diary; before you had your own tastes in food - dishes you loved and later refused, and dishes you once refused and later came to love; certificates and photographs to hang on the wall, a corner you preferred, and a special cup for your favourite drink; novels and books of poetry and bookmarks; prescription glasses and sunglasses; private thoughts and spiritual inclinations, experiences of consciousness and the unconscious; letters, beloveds, friends, and music whose melodies you would keep whenever the heart grew tender; and a Qur'anic surah with its own special resonance in your moments of reflection - Israel took all of this from you and gave you four graves instead. After a ceasefire was announced in October 2025, Alaa observes : "I cannot believe that the war has stopped, but I can believe that the occupation is a monster, and that humanity is its favourite prey." Under the rubble On 15 January 2024, Aya Shamma was at home with her three children: Yaman, seven; Nasser, five; and baby Rayan, just 51 days old. An Israeli plane bombed the house while the children were sleeping. The house collapsed on top of them. Yaman died of suffocation under the rubble. Baby Rayan was thrown from the third floor into a neighbouring house. Aya and her son, Nasser, were pulled from the debris by neighbours. Aya cannot stop crying for the two children she lost: "If tears could bring back loved ones, my tears would have brought you back," she writes . Addressing her son, Yaman , she recalls emerging from beneath the rubble and feeling her own heart still beating, convincing herself that her child must also be alive. She wrote: "Was I really so naive that I forgot each of us has a separate heart?" Yaman, pictured in a photo shared by his mother Aya Shamma, was one of two children killed in an Israeli air strike on their family home in Gaza in January 2024 (Facebook) Aya describes Yaman as "the little philosopher" who, at five years old, once asked why animals eat one another, and why they cannot all live on grass in peace. She tried to shield him from the cruelty of the world, only for that cruelty to reveal itself by killing him. "I didn't have a long goodbye. Death was closer to him than my embrace," she writes before expressing her impossible wishes in another eloquent post: "If only those who go to Heaven could return. If only one of them would peek out from behind a cloud, or send a message in the form of a breeze, to tell us how his face became light, and what that peace feels like - the kind no fear ever follows… If only you would return, Yaman, even for a moment, even in a dream, to sit in my lap as you used to, to ask me whether I missed you, and for me to answer you with tears, as I have done ever since you left." Stolen childhoods Aya Hassouna is another Palestinian mother whose heart Israel shattered by killing her two children and her husband. On 9 August 2024, her husband, Abdullah, was playing with their children, Hamza, four, and Raghd, two, in front of the tent they had set up in Khan Younis after being forcibly displaced from Gaza City. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza An Israeli warplane fired a missile that struck in front of the tent, killing all three, alongside others. As the lone survivor, Aya states: "I once had a beautiful family whom I loved so much, and my heart is still attached to them. Every morning, I wake up and look out from the window of our tent - the tent that used to be filled with your voices and laughter - towards the place where you were killed." She describes how Hamza's close friend Malik, with whom he had been playing, survived only because his mother had called him inside moments before the missile struck. Malik now comes every day, gazing at the tent from afar before approaching briefly and asking Aya: "When will Hamza come back?" My son was love and light, snuffed out by Israel's machinery of death Ahmed Abu Artema Read More » She tries to explain that Hamza is gone and will not return. The child did not understand what separation meant. He answered: "Why? Tell him to come back so we can play together." He asked why Hamza could not call them on video or send pictures. Aya writes: "Oh God, this war has stolen childhood itself." She goes on to explain why she refuses to describe her children as dead: "They were playing, and then suddenly they disappeared. My children are alive with their Lord, playing in Paradise." Alone with her grief, Aya recounts one night of displacement and solitude: In the late hours of the night, I hear the sound of a little girl crying in the camp next to ours. Her voice resembles my daughter Raghd's. Each time she cries, my heart and eyes cry with her. I remember Raghd crying at the start of the war because of the pain of a toothache. I used to stay up all night to comfort her. And now I stay awake all night, longing for them all. And my only recourse is patience, enduring with the hope of reunion. A single grave Asma al-Mughari lost 23 members of her family when Israeli planes bombed her home in the Bureij refugee camp on 17 October 2023. The air strike killed her two children - Aya, six, and Abdullah, five - whom she affectionately called Aboud, along with her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews. Their bodies remained under the rubble for 29 days before being buried together in a single grave. Siblings Aya and Abdullah, who were killed when an Israeli air strike hit their family home in the Bureij refugee camp in October 2023, in a photo shared by their mother, Asma al-Mughari (Facebook) Asma recounts : "I will never forget when someone told me, 'We gathered the bodies of eight children in one grave'." She refused to see her children's bodies, choosing instead to preserve the image she carried of them in life. "Forgive me... if I could, I would have protected you and kept you in my arms," she adds. In another post, Asma addresses her children during a holiday : "I did not wake up to your excitement. I did not dress you in your Eid clothes. I did not give you your Eid money. In Paradise, Mama." 'Forgive me... if I could, I would have protected you and kept you in my arms' - Asma al-Mughari Commenting on a photograph of children killed by Israel, Asma writes : In a parallel universe, a child takes a bath and puts on clean pyjamas. He eats a healthy meal, and his mother tucks him into a warm bed in a colourful room filled with toys. She reads him a bedtime story about love and peace, and he falls asleep, reassured. But in Gaza, that story is not told; it is what is witnessed in this image. Or perhaps the other possibility is that the child is no longer alive at all. Following US President Donald Trump' s speech in Israel's parliament, the Knesset, on 13 October, Asma comments : The most important person in the world today stands to honour a soldier who participated in killing my children. Meanwhile, he did not even acknowledge the 29,000 children whose lives were stolen. He knew nothing of the eyes of Aya and Aboud, extinguished unjustly. This is the justice of the world, manifested as zero, and it makes the mother of a murdered child look at everything around her with disgust and disappointment. After the announcement of what is supposed to be a ceasefire, the pace of daily killings in Gaza has slowed. But for bereaved parents, the wounds are beyond healing. The people of Gaza today are living through an indescribable tragedy, which seems endless. They live atop tens of millions of tonnes of rubble after Israel destroyed their homes and cities. Grief will accompany them for the rest of their lives, while the future remains uncertain in the absence of any serious international will to rebuild Gaza or hold the Israeli regime that committed all of these atrocities accountable for its crimes. Until then, the testimony of these mothers remains, refusing the reduction of their children to mere numbers and articulating an incomprehensible loss that continues to define Israel's genocide in Gaza. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Middle East Eye. Israel's genocide in Gaza Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0