Selene

How do we receive the news of the martyrdom of our beloved ones!!💔💔

Let me tell you today about the first blow life dealt me… or let me describe it more precisely, the first stab: the martyrdom of my brothers. For two and a half years, my heart has refused to move past that moment. I was displaced in Rafah, renting a house with a group of friends. It was the best option, considering that my husband spent more than 22 hours in the hospital, and on some days he was forced to be away for several days. I stood on the balcony overlooking a border area, staring at our stolen land, now covered with settlements, while we, unfortunately, lived in utter darkness, and the settlements were lit at night. That day, I felt an intense pain in my chest. My children had gone to sleep, and it was 7:00 PM, while my husband was in the hospital. It was December 2nd, the second month of the war. The pain overwhelmed me without warning, and I began to cry uncontrollably, missing my brothers deeply. Memories of the afternoon came back to me; my daughter was telling me that if the war ended and we returned north, she would go stay with her grandmother for two weeks, longing for her maternal uncles. My brothers were very close to me; the elder was like a second father, and the younger was my closest friend. I prayed and asked God to reunite me with them safely, but the crying continued—perhaps caused by my longing for them. I washed my face over and over, but I could not stop the torrent of tears. I tried calling my mother, but the line was cut off and there was no network. In the end, I surrendered to sleep. I awoke to movement, grabbed my phone, and saw it was 6:30 AM. I got up to find my husband entering from the hospital. I asked if he wanted a cup of coffee; he said yes, he would take a quick shower and return to the hospital, and the car would come back in half an hour. I lit a small fire on the balcony and started preparing a cup of coffee that resembled everything but coffee. I looked at the area before me—ominous black clouds sent shivers through my body. I heard my husband’s phone ring. I thought they had rushed him; often he was forced to return after a few minutes. I carried the cup, and he was speaking strangely, lifting his gaze and turning the phone away from me. I put down the cup after feeling a tremor… his face looked like the Angel of Death, the spirit being taken from him. I heard him say to the person on the line: “Go down, I’ll talk to you.” I could feel his hands trembling, and his words were broken as he spoke. He hung up. I asked him: “What happened?” He deliberately avoided looking at my face and said: “I’m hungry, help me get something to eat together.” Even though neither of us eats at this hour. With words full of fear, I asked: “Is my family okay?” He, avoiding my gaze, replied: “What does your family have to do with this?” Then he added: “A friend of mine from the Gaza hospital, how does he know your family?” He tapped my shoulder and said: “Quickly.” I was wearing my jacket, my hair loose, and went to the room with my children. I grabbed my phone like a robot and called my mother. I felt my heartbeat race a million times faster. When the line connected, I breathed a sigh of relief… but it wasn’t my mother’s voice. I asked: “Where’s Mama?” Our neighbor answered: “Here, Nada, don’t worry, your mother is fine.” I breathed more easily and felt temporary relief. I asked: “Is everyone okay?” She said: “I don’t know how to tell you…” I felt as if death had stolen my soul when I heard her words: “Your brothers have been martyred, and your father and mother went to say their farewell.” I hung up without responding and sat on the floor, feeling my legs give way and my soul withdraw from my body. My husband came to hurry me to prepare food, but he stopped speaking when he saw me like this with the phone in my hand. He asked: “Did you call anyone?” I raised my eyes barely able to see him, held up two fingers, and said: “Both of them, both.” He came closer quickly, held my shoulders, and said: “Nothing for sure, be strong.” I said: “My mom and dad went to say their farewells to them.” I felt him crying, and I felt that I had lost the ability to see. He said: “Say, may God accept them, patience comes at the first shock.” Seconds passed, and everyone in the house gathered. I kept telling myself: So it’s true, my brothers have left this life… how is this possible? I didn’t say goodbye, didn’t hold them, didn’t ask them to stay by my side. I just cried… my daughters collapsed after hearing this news. I remained silent except for my tears and memories, like a knife killing inside. Everyone was around me, and I was in another world, hearing the ache of the soul, but I didn’t know this would truly happen. I truly felt fires that would not extinguish in my chest. My mother called my husband, and when she spoke, she was firm: “Be strong.” This is what she had written for them since they were fetuses in my womb—that they would die at this moment. I asked her: “And the only words you spoke, were their bodies whole or dismembered?” She answered: “Whole, Mama, they kissed and said goodbye, they were like the moon.” I felt my mother choking despite wearing her robe of strength. My beloveds were buried in each other’s embrace. I felt I was losing consciousness. Later, I learned that she had collapsed while speaking to those around her, instructing them about me: “Don’t leave Nada alone, stay with her.” I was denied a proper farewell. I requested photos after their martyrdom, but they refused. I later learned that the person who called my husband was indeed a friend who had seen the news on television. My younger brother was a university lecturer, and I learned from those at home that they found out the same way. Even now, I feel the burn of that moment and the pain; it refuses to leave me, and I feel the injustice of not having said goodbye. I will write to you about my first night after their martyrdom…

The support link for my family⬇️⬇️https://chuffed.org/project/167068-urgent-assistance-for-nada #Palestine #Gaza

Some stories are folded into the pages of oblivion, yet they never lose their value. It is our duty to tell what we lived and what they endured, so that we preserve their memory and keep their impact alive in our hearts and minds. I will tell you a story I lived through in every detail, a story so painful it could kill, a story that left its mark on my heart and soul forever. During one of our periods of displacement, we were in the Deir al-Balah area, in a small private camp that housed about twenty families. All of them belonged to a prominent social class before the war, due to their affiliation with one of the active institutions. I could not describe our financial situation at the time, for everyone had been stripped of all their possessions, as if the war had taken everything—even dignity and safety. The camp residents knew each other as if they were one family. My last tent overlooked farmland stretching as far as the eye could see. I would escape the scorching sun into the tent, sit on the ground behind it from midday until late afternoon, read a little, drift into my memories, cry, and recall what had been and what we had become. Day by day, this place became a refuge for everyone from the blazing sun. Even in winter, it felt as if torment had been poured upon us inside the tent. Yet, a kind spirit united us, proving the saying true: sometimes a stranger is closer to the heart than any relative. Then I noticed a girl from one of the families, always sitting apart from us, as if she were born in another world—a world without pain or war, despite everything around her. I was weighed down by pains and wounds, and I will tell you about my own story in another post. I carried so many burdens that even a simple question about how I was would wound me and remind me that I was not okay. But day after day, her calmness caught my attention, and I learned her secret—a secret I had lived and continue to live: loss. Her mother hadn’t told me anything, but she asked me to speak with her and break her isolation. I refused at first; I do not like imposing myself on anyone. Days passed, and the wounds drove their stakes deeper into our hearts. One December day, a month before the first ceasefire, I was sitting alone, wrapped in a thin scarf that offered no protection against the cold or the wind, for we had lost all our clothes multiple times due to continuous shelling. I tried to draw warmth from the cold sun and escape in my memories to days that would never return, to friends who would never come back, to moments of safety that had become only memories. I felt someone approaching and sitting on a chair beside me. I looked up to find her there, smiling shyly, trying to hide her wounds, a false smile holding back tears. She said, her voice choked with pain, “May I sit?” I smiled at her and nodded. She began, “How are you?” I answered honestly, “I’m not okay.” She cried, and I cried with her, not yet knowing her full story. She placed her hand on her chest and said, “It hurts.” I remained quiet, but her wounds opened up new ones inside me, digging into the hidden corners of my soul. She continued, “His family refused our marriage because he was more handsome and better educated than me.” I listened in genuine shock. Then she smiled and said, “But we married, and I gave birth to twins.” Her smile disappeared when she added, “He was martyred in the first month of the war.” I embraced her, sharing the pain, and we cried together. She lifted her head and said, “Mama told me I could talk to you; she loves you.” I gestured for her to continue. “My husband’s family insisted that in order to keep my children with me, I had to marry his brother.” This cruel tradition, where a widow is forced to marry her deceased husband’s brother to preserve the “lineage” or family, sometimes works, but more often fails. She said, “I married him with his family’s blessing, but he treated me like an animal, because he wanted to be the first in my life.” She added, “After his face wore strange expressions, he was martyred one month after our marriage, targeted in a car outside the supermarket.” I felt a shiver run through my body. She said, “I became a source of misfortune in my husband’s family; they treated me as one treats livestock.” Then came the most shocking moment: “Three months later, our neighbor’s house was targeted, and my children were martyred with their grandmother. I was seriously injured.” We cried in anguish, and I held her to my chest, her entire body trembling with pain and grief. It was a difficult day, yet she felt some relief, while I drowned in questions about how I still managed to keep my sanity after everything I had lived. We never spoke of it again, and I left her free to share whatever she wanted. Yet I silently reproached her mother for accepting her marriage to another man despite her refusal, despite being an educated woman. Her reply was silence. She was a remarkable girl, yet after everything that happened, she sometimes acted strangely, with expressions that frightened me. We parted ways when we returned to the north, but fate did not give them much time; she and her family were martyred after the war resumed and the ceasefire failed. She left, adding a new wound to the long list of pains and stories I had endured during three years of catastrophe—stories that never end, memories that never fade, leaving in the heart a deep wound that will never heal.

The war has led us to nothing but a painful fate—a fate we did not choose, yet it chose us. Here, I try to shed light on some of the stories we lived through in a place that was once a safe haven for us, before it turned into a piece of hell. I was displaced in the city of Rafah, like thousands of others—strangers in our own land, crushed under psychological and physical humiliation. We were forced to do work far beyond our physical capacity, and found ourselves living a reality we had never known before—a nightmare we could not have imagined even in our worst dreams. Carrying water, lighting fires, baking bread… simple daily tasks elsewhere, but for us, they became small battles we fought every day just to survive. We lived every moment expecting that the next might bring news of losing someone dear. How I wished I could place my children inside my heart and walk away with them, far from all of this. I truly would have done it. The days were heavy with hardship under the sound of rockets, and the nights… were even more terrifying. We were living what could only be described as hell on earth. We waited for morning the way a starving person waits for food—if not more desperately. One day, my friend from the north managed to contact me through a rare internet connection. Her words were filled with hope. She told me she would head south, fleeing this hell with her daughter after a donor had covered the coordination costs. She was terrified for her child to the point of desperation, and that fear pushed her to knock on every door. I was so happy for her. We rejoiced when others managed to escape, as if it were salvation for all of us, in a time when we were falling one by one like rain. She told me she would come to say goodbye. I waited eagerly… longing to see a face that carried something of a beautiful past. The day she promised came… but she didn’t. Nor the next day. And with each passing day, the worry grew, and life became harsher. On the third day, I received a call from the European Hospital asking me to come. My heart raced. I looked around me—everyone was fine. So who was it? Without hesitation, I prepared to go, despite everyone’s objections. I felt that something grave awaited me. The road to the hospital was filled with danger. Bombardment was everywhere, and the explosions at sunset burned like flames devouring the sky. I covered my ears, trying to shield myself from the sound of death. I finally arrived… with a body still intact, but a shattered soul. The scene was unbearable: bodies everywhere, doctors treating the wounded in the hallways, and the smell of blood nearly made me faint. A child without limbs… a body without a head… I felt as if I had stepped into the heart of hell. Then I saw her. My friend… lying on a bed. Her hair was scattered, dried blood near her mouth, an IV connected to her hand… her body thin, as if life had quietly slipped away from it. I searched through the chaos for someone to explain what had happened. No one knew—until the doctor who had called me arrived. He said calmly: “We found your number in her phone.” Then he continued: “She was brought in from the checkpoint last night… she was with a young girl who had already passed away about a day earlier.” I opened my eyes in shock. I couldn’t speak. He added, “The mother is suffering from a severe nervous breakdown.” After that, I heard nothing. All I could think about was this: she had knocked on every door to save her daughter, and just as she came close to safety, death stole her child before her eyes. I sat beside her, holding her hand, crying silently. I called my children and told them I would stay there. I couldn’t say more. I spent the entire night by her side, watching her… as if she were asleep, except for the tears clinging to her eyelashes. I wished she would scream, speak—release the pain that had suffocated her. And in the morning… came a harsher dawn. Heavy bombardment, hundreds killed, death everywhere. Then the doctor came… And announced her death. A heart attack. I received the news alone. I cried like never before. I entered the hospital in fear… And left carrying a story of double death. Two bodies… a mother and her daughter. I accompanied them to their final resting place. Along the way, I stared at them in fear as my tears fell uncontrollably, my soul trembling from the horror I had lived. She only wanted to save her daughter… But the path to survival… became the path to death. “All we need from you is to extend a hand of help and support, at a moment when everyone else has abandoned us.”