When the Israeli army invaded Khan Younis and surrounded Nasser Hospital between March 23-26, many families were trapped inside their homes nearby. They were surprised to find Israeli tanks rolling up to their homes and snipers shooting anyone who stepped foot outside.
In a building of three stories, there were 52 people from the Barbakh family; in the first story, a family of 12 people lived through three horrifying days, trapped with the body of their murdered family member and constantly guarding the body against stray animals.
Seham Barbakh, 28, posted about the story on social media. I contacted her, and she told me her story. She had been staying at the apartment with her family, including her married sister and her three kids.
When the family realized that there were Israeli troops outside their home, they decided to stay inside and not risk evacuating and facing death.
The first night of the siege was horrifying. The family of 12 stayed in the kitchen hiding and putting their heads down, trying to protect themselves from the nonstop shelling, bombardment, and the shower of bullets that riddled the walls of their home. Those same bullet holes became the only way for the family to sneak a peak at what was going on outside.
Seham and her sister Suhad, 33, a mother of three children, used the bullet holes to look out onto the street. She used an empty bucket of water to step up on and reach the hole, and when she did, she saw two martyrs lying on the ground, and animals were eating their bodies.
“The scene impacted Suhad the most; she was going back and forth to look back at them; the animals were biting the martyrs; she was deeply sad about that, walking and releasing a sigh, then sitting on the couch, speechless. She returned to have a look at the bodies and paced again, repeatedly. She was saying, ‘poor man, he looks so young, he does not deserve this,’” Seham told me in a phone call.
The family asked Suhad to stop looking at the bodies. After three days, the bodies vanished, and only a spot of blood remained. The animals had eaten them completely.
“Suhad felt that she was going to be martyrd; once we found a will she had written and hid; she wrote, ‘I will die soon, take care of my kids.’,” Seham said.
On the third day, snipers shot at the family home. The bullet pierced Suhad’s back, leaving a hole as her flesh splattered onto Seham’s legs. Suhad’s feeling had been correct.
“My mother went crazy. She could not believe that her daughter died,” Seham told me. “She was screaming and trying to get out to get help. We tried to prevent her, but we couldn’t. She took a white flag and walked out the door. We were with her; all of us stood at the door waving the white flag, but the Israeli army shot at us, and my mother was almost killed.”
They stayed at home next to Suhad’s body. Her children were in shock. Her youngest, Saed, started to imagine that his aunt Seham was his mother, because she and Suhad looked alike. He was shaking and waking up to throw himself in her arms and kept saying, “My mom is back.”
After six days, the army’s bulldozers neared the house. They heard the sound, and an armed quadcopter drone hovered close to the windows, ordering them to leave within 5 minutes, or the house would be destroyed on their heads.
“They forced us to go and prevented us from taking anything with us, ordering us to raise our empty hands in the air and start walking,” Seham told me.
“When we walked out, I saw an elderly woman sitting on a plastic chair, and next to her, a little girl was bleeding out on the ground. The old woman looked on and cried, saying, ‘Oh my beloved Haneen.’ It looked like the girl was her granddaughter and that the Israelis were preventing her from picking her up to take her with her. She was unable to walk on her own.”
“We left our martyr Suhad in a room inside the house. We closed the door tight and left,” she said.
They returned after seven days to bury her, but when they arrived, her body was in advanced stages of decomposition.
Every person in Gaza now has a collection of stories about what they lost and how they lost it. And the story of Suhad is just one among millions.
