( Human Rights Watch ) – “I would tell my husband I felt like it was a palace,” Shaima Abu Jazar told me, describing the family’s three-story home in Rafah in southern Gaza. They had lived in it for just six months before it was leveled to the ground in an Israeli airstrike in February 2024. Shaima and her husband, Abdullah, had bought it new. “We saved for 15 years to get this house,” she said.
I spoke to Shaima, 33, in June by her hospital bed in Doha, Qatar, as she recovered from her 47th surgery to treat injuries sustained in the blast that killed Abdullah, their son Mohammed, 15, and daughter Jenan, 11, and resulted in her nine-month pregnancy ending in stillbirth. Her two surviving children, Jenan’s twin brother Hudaifa, 11, and her daughter Maryam, 6, are living with her in her hospital room.
Shaima is just starting to regain function of her legs again with the assistance of a walker. When the current hostilities between Israel and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza started on October 7, 2023, Shaima was always on the move. She was a baker, she filled her days—and her Instagram—with birthday cakes with icing ribbons, chocolate covered fruit, and chewy date cookies she prepared for clients.
Eleven months later, her photo reels are a keepsake of her 13 relatives killed in three Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, including the bombing that injured her and killed her husband and children. The first attack was on October 10, when Shaima’s sister-in-law’s home was hit in a blast killing her, her husband, and three children, ages 6, 4, and 1. A second, on October 13, killed her brother-in-law, his wife, and three of their children. Four months later, on February 11, came the devastating strike on Shaima’s new home.
Following the October 10 strike that hit Shaima’s sister-in-law’s home, rescue workers found a decapitated body of a girl who family members assumed was Shaima’s niece Dima, 16, on a neighbor’s rooftop. The remains were laid to rest with Shaima’s sister-in-law’s family. Two days later, relatives found Dima alive and at the European Hospital. They still do not know the identity of the girl buried with the family.
“120 Days of Hell”
On October 14, Shaima left her home in Rafah with her four children to shelter in a school run by the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, in Tal al-Sultan refugee camp, believing her family would be safer there. Shaima was five months pregnant and had missed her first ultrasound appointment, scheduled for October 8.
Shaima estimates at least 5,000 displaced people ended up sheltering at the school during the time she stayed there. She and her family were cramped in a classroom with at least 50 others. “The bathroom was a struggle on its own. You’d have to wait half an hour, an hour, until it was your turn,” Shaima said. Yet, hoping to be safe, they stayed for 120 days.
Shaima said UNRWA, which was now operating the school as a shelter, “provided us with salty water for washing and bathing the children. But many times, barely any water was available, so I used a can with some water in it behind the door of the class to [bathe] my children and wash the dishes.” With no privacy, Shaima had to fashion this makeshift washing area, like all the other families there.
There was not enough drinking water and every few days a tanker of non-potable water would arrive. Displaced people in the shelter often resorted to drinking this. Some developed diarrhea and vomiting while others, including a niece in Shaima’s care, contracted Hepatitis A.
The family subsisted on canned tuna and beans, cheese and stale bread that they purchased or were given. “A pregnant woman needs food, children need food. We didn’t see fruit, we didn’t see vegetables,” Shaima told me. “Our bodies were very weak. Our children weren’t able to get up and play or move around.”
During those 120 days, Shaima’s husband, a cleric who administered a charity network, stayed in their home in Rafah and continued work.
The Attack
On February 11, as she was reaching the end of her pregnancy, Shaima felt a contraction. “I left the school to bring clothes for the baby,” she said. Shaima took her children and returned to their family home in Rafah in what was supposed to be a quick trip home before returning to the camp and await her delivery.
She found the house dusty and in disarray. She started cleaning, hoping to have people over to greet the new baby after she had delivered. “I prepared the house, washed the carpets, and washed the bedding so I could prepare my house for visitors,” she said. “I didn’t know I was preparing my house for the bombing.”
By the end of the day, Shaima and the children were ready to go back to the UNRWA shelter at the school. Shaima had stuffed their luggage with essentials for the baby. Her daughter Jenan packed nail polish.
But then Shaima’s husband said he was craving ma’moul, the crumbly date cookie Shaima used to bake before the war. “So I cancelled going back to the school that night,” she said, planning instead to return to school the next morning.”
At first, the evening was like a return to their normal lives. Jenan danced around, filming Shaima on her phone baking a beautiful batch of ma’moul.
But nighttime was frightening for the family, since most airstrikes occurred then. The Rafah home had already been struck by a bomb in December.
Eleven-year-old Jenan protested, “Mama, please let’s not sleep at home tonight,” and
6-year-old Maryam went to sleep at her grandparents’ house nearby.
“I can’t walk a single step to the school,” Shaima, now nine months pregnant, told Jenan. “It takes a quarter of an hour to walk to the school.” There was no transportation at all, she told me, only war.
“Children’s Screams,” Digital, Midjourney, 2024
Around 2 a.m., the family awoke to explosions. Everyone huddled in Shaima and her husband’s bed. At 3 a.m., as blasts intensified, Shaima asked Jenan to grab her prayer hijab on the other side of the room. The family was readying to flee. She told me:
She grabbed the prayer hijab to give it to me, but she didn’t get to pass it to me. Just then a strike hit our building. Suddenly the ceiling was collapsing on top of me. The building had been split in half. The side I was on collapsed into the road. There were flames on my feet, and the flesh on my legs started to melt. I was lucky that our water tank had fallen right next to me, I was able to use the water to put out the fire. That’s the only reason I didn’t lose my entire left leg. It was a very scary sight. Our bed was divided into two halves. My half flew away and [my husband’s] half stayed in the house.
I heard Hudaifa screaming, “Don’t leave me down here!” from under the rubble. People dug him out – his face, body and left foot were covered in burns. They said he would lose his sight, but by some miracle he hasn’t. I didn’t hear my other children screaming.
Shaima’s father found her amidst the rubble and carried her to Mohammed Yousef El-Najar Hospital in Rafah. First, nurses put her in a tent outside of the main building because beds were not available inside, but when they saw that her injuries were serious, she was moved inside. Then a doctor sent her outside again, pointing to dead and injured bodies across the floor, and said there was no room for her.
After three hours with no one treating her, Shaima’s father carried her to the European Hospital the next town over in Khan Younis. No one had informed her that her husband and two children were killed in the strike. She told me:
My doctor thought I knew they were martyred so he said to me, “I used to love praying behind your husband, may he rest in peace. His voice was very beautiful when he recited the Quran.” I told him, “May he rest in peace.” I pretended to know.
I later found out my husband died 20 minutes after the attack, his intestines had been lying outside of his body. My older son, Mohammed, had a metal fragment injury in his head.
Jenan was also killed. She was found with both of her legs severed and shrapnel in her head. There’s a picture of Jenan after she was martyred hanging on the wall [of their house] and the headscarf hanging behind her on the same wall.
Shaima told me about a viral photo of her daughter’s remains that circulated online the day after the strike. “Jenan’s gone, may she rest in peace,” she said of the girl who had danced with her in the kitchen just hours before her house and her mother’s world was broken in two.
After three hours waiting in the European hospital, Shaima was in surgery. She had seven fractures in her left leg and foot, three fractures in her right leg and foot, and severe burns all over. She told me:
When I saw my injuries, I fainted. I begged the doctors, “Please do a cesarean on me and take the baby out of my belly. Let him live,” I mean. It’s enough that the others were martyred. At the time, my baby was still alive. They told me, “Your health comes first. You had operations and your condition is critical. The next day.”
After two days the baby stopped moving. I had a stillbirth on the third day. … [Israel] denied him even the cry of life. I held my son for four minutes before they took him from me and shrouded him. I told them to name him after his father, Abdullah, and open up his father’s grave and put him in his father’s embrace. They opened his father’s grave three days later days and found his father as he was, as if he were sleeping, with a smile on his face.
Shaima remained calm for most of our conversation, but was overcome with emotion when she told me of an interview she saw of a man from Gaza whom she didn’t know. He claimed that it was his daughter in the photograph that had gone viral on social media. She told me to tell the world that this horrifying image, so iconic of the brutal consequences of Israel’s war in Gaza, was of her daughter, no one else’s.
Doha
On March 3, 2024, Shayma paid $20,000 in US dollars to get out of Gaza with Hudaifa and Maryam. The doctors in Gaza told her they planned to amputate both of her legs. She went to Egypt for a second opinion where she underwent several surgeries, and then onward to Doha on March 18, where she has had more.
When we spoke in June, it was one day before heading into yet another surgery. “God willing, after that they’ll start training me to walk,” Shaima said. “I don’t have a heel. My heel bone was pulverized, so they made me a special shoe and God willing, I’ll be able to walk after that.”
Hudaifa has had 20 surgeries. His face has largely healed, and he walks with crutches.
Shaima’s thoughts remain with her family and friends in Gaza:
I went to visit my friend in December living in a tent… I asked her to bring me a mattress and we sat outside in the rain. I couldn’t stand it; the tent was too hot. Imagine how the tent is now in June. When I talk to my family, I can see their faces are burned from the sun. They are sitting by the sea all day because they can’t stand the tent. … I was talking to some relatives of mine, and I didn’t recognize them because they have changed so much. They’re so thin and burned from the sun. … My siblings say to me “Don’t even think of coming back to Gaza.” But I want to go to my husband’s grave. I haven’t said goodbye to my husband and children.
She talks about her life with her two surviving children in Doha:
I pretend to be strong in front of Hudaifa. At night, he puts a doll next to him on one side and another doll on the other side, one named Jinan and one Muhammad. He talks to them at night, he says, “Forgive me, Jinan, I used to hit and bully you.” He used to boss her around because he is five minutes older than her.
And then he turns to the other doll and says, “Forgive me Hamouda. Yes, brother, you were my support. You defended me at school. If anyone wanted to do anything to me, you would come to defend me. Who will defend me from now on?”
It’s hard for us to get through the night. It reminds us of our pain.
Shaima waits for Maryam and Hudaifa to fall asleep before she lets herself cry. She says:
And Maryam was her father’s darling. … She always draws pictures of a woman and a man. I ask her, “Who are you drawing, Maryam?” “You and dad.” I say to her, “God willing, we will be reunited with him in heaven and see him. You must pray for him now… Focus on your studies, become a doctor, and treat patients so they don’t die like your father did.
God willing, she will not be deprived of her mother, and God willing, I will walk again so I can raise them.
The full report “‘Five Babies in One Incubator’: Violations of Pregnant Women’s Rights Amid Israel’s Assault on Gaza,” is available at:
https://www.hrw.org/node/390331
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