Ward Halil emerges from the living flame, but her mother and two brothers are killed in an Israeli Air Force attack.
Ward Halil stares at the camera, her eyes narrowly focusing as she remembers the horror she has experienced.
“When I woke up I found a huge fire and saw my mother dead,” she says. She said she survived the Israeli air attack early Monday, which killed her mother, two brothers and 33 others.
Video footage of the 6-year-old ward, with her tiny body silhouetted in flames after an attack on the Fami al-Jarjawi school in Gaza, shocks people all over the world, highlighting the ferociousness of Israel’s attack on Gaza.
Ward’s father and brother also survived the attack, but both remained in the hospital.
The school had evacuated several families, including many children, when targeted by the Israeli fire.
“I walked through the fire so I could get away. …I was in the fire, the ceiling fell above me. The ceiling all collapsed. The fire was on fire,” Ward revealed her voice. “Look? My arms are burned here,” she said. He showed injuries to the camera.
Ward sobbed as if explaining what had happened to her family.
Footage taken from the school after the attack shows rescuers and distraught relatives lying on the floor with blood stained walls and burnt mattress lying on the floor, seeking signs of survivors.
Ward’s uncle, Eyad Al-Sheikh Khalil, rushed to school after seeing the photos online.
“I was looking at the photos posted by journalists, and when I saw the wards with civil defense, I realized that it was my nie,” he said of the image of the ward being comforted by rescue workers near the school, the image of hair dulled with ashes from fire to ashes.
“What do you think a child will feel when someone comes out of an attack like this in a war?” asked Aird. “Of course, she’ll suffer mentally. We’re all in pain mentally.”
“That’s indescribable,” the survivor, who was pulled out of the tile rub with his son, told the rescuer. “The body parts, the burning bodies, the smell of burning. I swear to God, our hearts are dead. We are shaking, we are exhausted. It’s enough.”
Gaza displaced people have gathered in schools affiliated with the United Nations since the start of the war with the Israeli enclave in October 2023.
On May 7, Israeli forces targeted a single school that twice protected 2,000 Palestinians on the same day, killing at least 29 civilians in a Breage refugee camp, which includes women and children.
Almost three-quarters of all Gaza school buildings have been directly hit by Israeli fires since October 2023, according to UNRWA, the United Nations aid agency for Palestinian refugees. According to a UN satellite-based assessment, 95% of Gaza schools suffered damage and maintain the majority.
UNRWA said the UNRUN shelter is “overwhelmed by displaced people desperately seeking safety,” in an update after the attack on Fahmi Al-Jarjawi school. He also emphasized that the lack of food in Gaza due to the three-month siege imposed on the territory by Israel has increased the suffering of the people.
“Many families are evacuated to abandoned, unfinished or damaged buildings,” the agency explained. “Hygiene is dire. In some cases, hundreds of people have to share a single toilet. Others, including children and pregnant women, are open.”
Source link
