Their lives came into my own, and Israel killed them. These are some of their stories.

Sadness replaces sadness. A new calamity makes people forget the one that came before it. People have little time to grieve in this war. They come together, they die together, they are buried together in the same shroud.

Those who die together in an overnight airstrike as they sleep in their beds are later buried in the same position they were found in. No one can release a daughter from the arms of her mother, who were both buried under the rubble.

These are the stories of people whose lives came into my own. I saw them in life, and I saw them in death.

Married and martyred in war

Wa’d Abu Shouq, 27, is a mother to three daughters. Lara, her eldest, is 7. Then there’s 5-year-old Yara, followed by 3-year-old Judy.

She was killed in the Zawaydeh region of southern Gaza on October 15. She died alongside her youngest, Judy.

I’ve always seen Wa’d like I would a bird, light and agile, loving everyone, and her three girls most of all. They always hovered around her as though they were a single flock. Her devotion to them was tireless and unending. She was a wonderful mother, and her daughters were lucky to have her.

Wa’d, whose name means “promise,” fled the al-Tawam area in northern Gaza and sought refuge in al-Zawaydah with one of her relatives. She was in an apartment housing over 25 people, all of them women and children, with a few young men.

When the house was bombed, Wa’d had been holding her youngest daughter in her arms, her two other daughters and her husband sleeping beside them. Everyone in the house was injured, but Wa’d died alongside Judy as she cradled her. When she was transported to the hospital, no one was able to release Judy’s lifeless body from her mother’s embrace, so they were wrapped in the same shroud and buried together.

Her other daughters were critically injured, and her husband received catastrophic injuries to his legs. Her aunt was also killed.

Wa’d got married in 2014 during a few short days of ceasefire in the middle of one of Israel’s wars on Gaza. Her wedding had been set to begin around the same time as when the war began, but the war’s devastation made that impossible. When a humanitarian ceasefire was declared, Wa’d was married.

Wa’d’s parents do not live in Gaza. Her mother and father left many years ago for the UAE, but Wa’d had refused to join them, preferring to remain with her grandmother in Gaza. She grew up in Gaza until she married one of her relatives from the same family. 

She would always say that there is nowhere more beautiful to live than Gaza. She always said that she would never leave, even though her entire family had already left, and her father kept trying to entice her to join them in a life of luxury and comfort in exile. 

But she always said that life and death were not in Israel’s hands, or in the force of the earth’s fire, but in the hands of God. She insisted on living in the homeland where she was born, because she loved her sea and her sun, her land and her people. She could not part with her roots and leave this land just because it was occupied and bombed. She used to say this after every war — that we’ve survived yet again, because people’s lives are not in the hands of Israel’s warplanes, but in the hands of the Creator.

Even when her younger sisters decided to listen to their father’s entreaties from the UAE to emigrate without return, she was unshaken in her resolve not to leave. 

And she never did, until she left this world.

The martyr’s mother

Maram Shaqalia is 32 years old. She used to work as an accounting manager at the Rayyan Company, where I also used to work as a content writer in 2016 and 2017. Maram always used to say that her dream was to get married and be blessed with a daughter. She always said that all she wanted in the world was a little girl who resembled her and who she could raise and spoil and teach.

Maram was beautiful and loved by everyone. She always laughed and was skilled in turning regular sorrow into bad jokes that we couldn’t help but laugh at, even when they weren’t funny — because it was her saying them, with her signature wit and spontaneity. 

After her marriage, she was blessed with a daughter, and she named her Yumna. Her happiness was indescribable. She would always post photos of her on social media, pictures of herself and her daughter wearing new matching outfits, and pictures of Yumna’s laughter. She was always grateful that her dreams came true.

On October 15, Yumna was killed by shrapnel when Israel bombed a building near Maram’s family home. Yumna was less than a year old. 

Maram was devastated. She wrote on Facebook that she had suffered and waited for so many years until she was able to give birth to her baby girl, that her baby girl was her heart. She said: “From this day forward, call me the mother of the martyred Yumna.” She wrote at length about her love for her daughter. I called her to offer my condolences. The sorrow in her voice was greater than what I could bear to hear, and greater than what I could possibly describe. When she answered the phone, the first thing she told me was, “Yumna is gone. Yumna, who I waited for for so long, is gone. Do you remember what I would tell you about her at work, even though she wasn’t born yet?”

Five days later, when all telecommunications and internet were cut off from Gaza, Maram was staying in another building to which she had fled. It was hit by an Israeli airstrike, and almost everyone inside was killed, among them Maram, the mother of the martyred Yumna. Her husband was severely injured.

Maram and Yumna and Wa’d and Judy, and all the other thousands of mothers and their children were exterminated in cold blood during this war. They were killed in their homes seeking shelter from Israel’s missiles. They were killed seeking refuge in “safe zones” to which the army ordered them to flee. And those who were killed outside those zones were also civilians in their homes who did not pose a threat to anybody.

The Israelis boast of these achievements, exulting in having killed 8,000 “terrorists” in the Gaza Strip. Maram and her daughter Yumna, Wa’d and her daughter Judy, are those “terrorists,” and Israel takes pride in their pain.