2023-12-04 18:47:35
GAZA – Two weeks have passed and they still don’t know what happened to the sons and brothers. In shock of it. Crowded into a tent for displaced people on the grounds of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, 36 women and children have four blankets to share between them.
They lived in Zeitoun, southeast of Gaza City, where they farmed their 69 dunam (17 acres) in peace.
But since the first day of Israel’s offensive on Gaza, October 7, they have been forced to flee south, choosing to take what the Israeli military says is a “safe corridor”: Salah al-Din, the main north-south thoroughfare in the Gaza Strip. But the corridor was not so safe.
When they arrived at the newly established Israeli checkpoint, the family was walking along the road to prevent the bodies of dead Palestinians from being pinned to the ground. Before the family might pass through the turnstile, the soldiers ordered Abdullah al-Samouni, 24, to step to the side of the road, into a trench hidden from view. His younger brother Hamam, 16, started calling Abdullah.
Each passing day is like a year to us.” “Someone sits by the entrance of the tabernacle hoping for news of them. “I want to know what happened to them, if they’re okay, if they’re alive,” each recalls.
They said they saw torn limbs of children among the dead bodies on the road. Sahwa said that when he made the same trek three days later, Israeli soldiers told him to shoot anyone who stopped moving or looked back.
Used the worst words and cursed our Prophet Muhammad and God. They called us pro-Hamas and promised to finish us off when we went south.
He walked in a line and looked back. The soldiers told him to look straight, and when he turned his head, they shot him in the stomach.
“This is not a safe corridor, it is a death corridor. It is a corridor of fear,” she added. “They killed people, they beat them, stripped them of their clothes.”
The terror suffered by the al-Tsamuni clan is the latest in a series of traumas that began in 2008-2009 when Israeli troops killed 48 of their family members in Operation Cast Lead.
The army herded several families under one roof and fired missiles at the houses, killing dozens. Some waved white flags and got out, but when the Red Cross was allowed to enter the building three days later, they found 13 injured people, including eight children, who had gone days without food or water. , surrounded by the corpses of their parents and relatives.
16-year-old Hamam al-Samouni is one of the brothers abducted by Israeli soldiers. One of the victims was Sahwa’s husband Athiya. Their daughter Amal, Abdullah’s twin sister, was only eight at the time, but remembers everything in detail.
The soldiers shouted in Hebrew for the homeowner to come forward. Atia, who previously worked in Israel, raised her hands and identified herself. “They shot him between the eyes and then in the chest,” Amal said. “Then they opened fire, the bullets piercing his body.”
Before, when tanks surrounded their home, Atiya had taught her children to say in Hebrew, “We are children,” but it made no difference.
“After they shot my father, they started shooting at us,” Amal said. “Abdullah and I were injured. They set fire to one of the bedrooms and we suffocated from the smoke.
Hamam was barely a year old then. Their brother Ahmad, aged four, was shot twice in the head and chest and bled to death until dawn the next morning, as Israeli forces prevented ambulances from reaching the area.
Ahmad died in his mother Zahwa’s arms. She lost her husband, son and home, and in the 15 years since that fateful day, the family has had to work twice as hard to rebuild their lives.
Shifa Al-Samouni, Faraj’s wife, said her six children might not sleep without their father. At the center of it all was Faraj. He soon assumed the role of the man of the house without complaint and helped raise his younger siblings. He was a farmer and very handy. He built the house with his own hands and, despite his humble background, refused any charity.
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