Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Palestine – The ceasefire in Gaza was scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. (06:30 GMT). The Al Qidra family endured 15 months of Israeli attacks. More than once they were refugees and living in tents. Their relatives were among more than 46,900 Palestinians killed by Israel.
However, the Alkydra survived. And they wanted to go home.
Ahmed al-Qidra took his seven children on a donkey cart and headed east to Khan Younis. It’s finally safe to travel. The bombing had to stop.
But the family did not know that the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas had been postponed. What they did not know was that even after several more hours had passed, Israeli aircraft were still flying over Gaza, ready to drop bombs.
The explosion was loud. Ahmed’s wife Hanan heard it. She remained at a relative’s house in the city center, gathering her belongings and making plans to join her husband and children in a few hours.
“It was like an explosion had hit my heart,” Hanan said. She knew instinctively that something had happened to the children she had just said goodbye to.
“My children, my children!” she screamed.
The cart was hit. Hanan’s eldest son, Adly, 16, died. The same was true for her youngest child and the baby of the family, six-year-old Sama.
Yasmin, 12, explained that there was a four-wheel drive vehicle in front of the cart carrying people celebrating the ceasefire. Maybe that’s why the missile fell.
“I saw Sama and Adly lying on the floor and my father bleeding and unconscious on the cart,” Yasmin said. She pulled her eight-year-old sister Aseel out before a second missile hit where they were. Eleven-year-old Mohammed also survived.
However, Hanan’s lifelong partner Ahmed was pronounced dead at the hospital.
‘My children were my world’
Hanan, who was sitting on the edge of his injured daughter Iman’s hospital bed at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, was still in shock.
“Where was the truce?” she asked. In the excitement of finally getting back everything that was left of their home, the family missed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declaring that the Palestinian group Hamas had not sent the names of three Israeli prisoners scheduled for release on Sunday. armistice agreement.
They did not see Hamas explain that there was a technical reason for the delay and that names would eventually be provided.
What they probably didn’t know was that the three-hour delay before the ceasefire would eventually lead to the deaths of three members of their family. They were among 19 Palestinians killed by Israel in the past few hours, according to Gaza’s Civil Defense Department.
Hannah shed tears. Now she will have to live a life without a husband and two children. The loss of Sama, “the last of the pack,” as she described her in an Arabic proverb, was especially difficult.
“Sama was my youngest and most spoiled. “Every time I talked about having more children, she got angry.”
Adly was her “pillar of support.” Her children were her world.
“We endured the entire war, facing the harshest displacement conditions and bombings,” Hanan said. “My children suffered from hunger, lack of food and lack of basic necessities.”
“We survived this war for over a year, but they died at the last moment. “How can this happen?”
A day of joy turned into a nightmare. The family had celebrated the end of the war the night before.
“Hasn’t the Israeli army had enough of our blood and the atrocities they committed in 15 months?” Hanan asked.
Then she thought about her future. Stripped of her husband and two children, she tearfully asked, “What is left?”
