They fled death more than once, but in Gaza, there is nowhere left to run. Doha Abdo, 28, and her three young children, Sham, Khaled, and Adam, were killed in the early hours of Thursday when Israeli suicide drones struck the shelter where they had been seeking safety. The strike burned them alive in their sleep. Their bodies were so charred they could only be identified by name.
Doha had been displaced five times in just a few weeks. After the death of her husband Mohammad at the start of the war, she carried her children from one camp to another, searching for a sliver of protection. Instead, she was buried beside them in white shrouds, burned, broken, and never given the chance to say goodbye.
“She used to say: If we die, let’s go together,” her brother Abdulrahman told Felesteen. “She didn’t want to be left behind mourning them, or for them to be left mourning her.” Her final wish was granted in the most brutal way.
Doha’s youngest, Adam, was just two years old. Sham, only seven, dreamed of becoming a doctor. Her mother had been teaching her at home, too afraid to send her to learning centres under constant threat of bombing.
Their grandfather, their cousin baby Leen, and nearly the entire Hijaila family were also killed in the attack. All had sought refuge at the UN shelter in Gaza City’s Mustafa Hafez School. At 2 a.m., three drones struck without warning.
“What law allows this?” cried her uncle, Othman Abdo. “They burned them alive. A mother and her babies, is that what war looks like now?”
Doha’s mother, already grieving the death of her son Musab earlier in the war, now sat near her only daughter’s body, barely able to speak. She had visited them just a day before. Now, they were gone.
The loss is unspeakable, yet it is far from isolated. The streets of Gaza are lined with similar stories, of children erased from life and memory, of mothers burying their sons, or being buried with them. There is no safety, not even in sleep.
“She dreamed of her husband,” Abdulrahman said. “Maybe she knew her time was near. Maybe she was saying goodbye, and we just didn’t hear it.”
In Gaza, entire families vanish before the world’s eyes. No one is spared. Not the sick. Not the displaced. Not the children. Doha and her children are no longer searching for safety. In death, they are together. And in memory, they remain a searing reminder of how war steals even the right to live, and to love, in peace.
Source : Safa News
