International Courant
Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Palestine – The ceasefire in Gaza was resulting from start at 8:30 am (06:30 GMT). The Al-Qidra household needed to endure fifteen months of Israeli assaults. They’d been displaced greater than as soon as and lived in a tent. Their kin have been among the many greater than 46,900 Palestinians killed by Israel.
However the al-Qidras had survived. They usually wished to go residence.
Ahmed al-Qidra packed his seven kids on a donkey cart and set out for the east of Khan Younis. It was lastly protected to journey – the bombings ought to have stopped.
However the household didn’t know that the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas had been postponed. Little did they know that, even in these additional few hours, Israeli planes have been nonetheless flying over the skies of Gaza, able to drop their bombs.
The explosion was loud. Ahmed’s spouse Hanan heard it. She had stayed behind at a relative’s residence within the heart of the town, organizing their belongings, and deliberate to hitch her husband and kids a couple of hours later.
“The explosion felt prefer it hit my coronary heart,” Hanan mentioned. She knew instinctively that one thing had occurred to her kids, whom she had solely simply mentioned goodbye to.
“My kids, my kids!” she shouted.
The cart was hit. Hanan’s eldest son, 16-year-old Adly, was lifeless. This additionally utilized to her youngest, six-year-old Sama, the child of the household.
Yasmin, 12, defined that there was a four-wheel drive in entrance of the cart with folks celebrating the ceasefire. That will have been the rationale the rocket hit.
“I noticed Sama and Adly mendacity on the bottom, and my father bleeding and unconscious on the cart,” Yasmin mentioned. She pulled her eight-year-old sister Aseel out earlier than a second missile hit the place they’d been. Eleven-year-old Mohammed additionally survived.
However Ahmed, Hanan’s life associate, was pronounced lifeless on the hospital.
The automobile that drove in entrance of the Al-Qidras donkey cart might have been the goal of the Israeli airstrike (Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera)
‘My kids have been my world’
Hanan sat on the sting of her injured daughter Iman’s hospital mattress at Khan Younis Nasser Hospital and was nonetheless in shock.
“The place was the ceasefire?” she requested. Of their pleasure to lastly return to what was left of their residence, the household had missed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who said that the Palestinian group Hamas had not forwarded the names of the three Israeli prisoners scheduled to be launched on Sunday as a part of the terrorist motion. ceasefire settlement.
They’d not seen Hamas clarify that there have been technical causes for the delay, and that the names can be offered as they ultimately have been.
They might not know that within the three-hour delay earlier than the ceasefire would lastly take impact, three members of their household can be killed. Gaza Civil Protection mentioned they have been amongst 19 Palestinians killed by Israel in current hours.
Hanan al-Qidra is left to look after her remaining kids alone after her husband Ahmed was killed within the Israeli assault in Khan Younis on January 19 (Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera)
Hanan burst into tears. She would now must face life with out her husband and with out two of her kids. The lack of Sama, ‘the final of the bunch’ as she described her with the Arabic saying, was significantly tough.
“Sama was my youngest and most spoiled. She bought offended once I talked about having one other baby.”
Adly had been her “pillar”. Her kids have been her world.
“We’ve got endured this whole battle, dealing with the harshest circumstances of displacement and bombardment,” Hanan mentioned. “My kids confronted starvation, lack of meals and fundamental wants.”
‘We survived this battle for greater than a 12 months, solely to be killed within the final minutes. How can this occur?”
A day of pleasure had changed into a nightmare. The household had celebrated the tip of the battle the evening earlier than.
“Have not the Israeli military had sufficient of our blood and the atrocities they’ve dedicated for 15 months?” Hanan requested.
Then she thought of her future. Along with her husband and two of her kids torn from her and tears streaming down her face, she requested, “What’s left?”
‘My kids, my kids’: Gaza household killed minutes earlier than ceasefire | Israeli-Palestinian Battle Information
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