When we were displaced to the al-Bureij camp in April 2024, I used to walk through its streets with my mother searching for food and water. The camp has three entrances from Salah al-Din Road. There are no street numbers or big buildings left. The first entrance to the camp off Salah al-Din is the main entrance. The second we call the middle entrance, and the third we call the last entrance. The building where we stayed was near the middle entrance and directly across from another camp, Nuseirat.
As we searched, we would walk up and down the side street next to our building, directly opposite the market at the middle entrance. The street has more destroyed houses than standing ones. Every time I passed by, I would see a woman accompanied by a small child park her wheelchair on the right side of the street in front of a ruined building and stay there a long time.
I never saw her face clearly, but the medical bandages covering her body suggested that she was badly injured. The rubble she gazed at was likely her home. I approached and greeted her. There were tears in her eyes as she looked at me, and her voice broke as she talked. The child with her seemed lost in another world, detached from everything around him.
I looked closely at her injuries. I was shocked to learn that she was pregnant. For a moment, I wondered how a fetus could survive such severe wounds on its mother’s body. I asked her if there was anything I could do to help. “No one can help me,” she replied. “Who can lift all this rubble of stones?”
I told her, “The war will end one day, and they will clear it.”
She smiled bitterly and said, “My daughters and my husband are still there, buried beneath the rubble.” Her voice choked as she told me through her tears what had happened.
Her name was Nadine. On Oct. 17, 2023, one of the deadliest nights of the war, they were asleep when her 4-year-old son Ibrahim woke her up to take him to the bathroom. Suddenly, she felt intense heat and a blinding light. When she woke up days later, she was in the hospital, her body encased in metal braces.
When she regained consciousness, she learned that her husband Ahmed, 39, a simple merchant who sold clothes and shoes, and her two daughters — 10-year-old Heyam, in fourth grade, and 8-year-old Mira, in second grade — had been martyred. Only she, her son and the fetus in her womb had survived. She hadn’t even known she was pregnant before then.
“We remained under the rubble for hours,” she told me. She looked at the child whom I had tried in vain to engage in conversation. “I was unconscious, but he later told me that he could hear his sister crying for help, begging for water, telling him that their older sister was dead at her feet, the stones crushing them. He was trapped, unable to see anything, but he kept talking to her, telling her to hold on. Then he heard the voices of rescuers trying to pull them out. He called out to his sister, telling her they would be saved, but she never answered. She had followed their father and sister.”
After that day, Ibrahim barely spoke and hated going outside. But he still accompanied his mother, pushing her wheelchair and helping her get treatment.
I didn’t know what to say. Nadine spoke first: “I wish I could at least hold their bones just to bury them.”
The place was nothing but a massive pile of stones and iron. Her husband and daughters were buried in a spot no one could reach. There weren’t enough resources or machinery to remove the debris. All heavy equipment had been destroyed.
“Recently,” she added, her voice quivering, “they recovered part of my husband’s remains, a fragment of his skeleton and the skeleton of one of my daughters. The other is still under the rubble, alone. I don’t know which one was buried and which one is still waiting beneath the ruins. I never imagined I would see my husband and daughters as bones, pieced together. My husband had no political affiliations — he was just a simple man. Our house was at the entrance to al-Bureij.”
I sat beside her wheelchair and held her hand. I tried comforting her, saying that Allah had spared her son and her unborn child.
She said, “My husband died, and we didn’t even know about the pregnancy. The fetus was only a month old then. Now it’s seven months.”
I asked her what she would name the baby.
“A girl,” she said. “I’ll name her Habiba [Beloved].”
We parted, and I wondered at the immensity of her pain. How could she bear it?
Days passed, and I didn’t see her again. When I asked the neighbors about her, they told me she had given birth to Habiba in the seventh month. The doctors said her injuries wouldn’t let her carry the baby to full term.
My mother and I went to visit Nadine in her new home. She had been displaced again and was living with her late brother’s wife. Her brother, Mohammed, had also been martyred on July 30, 2024. Until his martyrdom, her brother and his family had been living there after their parents passed away. Nadine had been staying there since she was discharged from the hospital, and she remains there to this day.
We found Nadine seated on a small mattress, with little Habiba beside her. The baby’s brother Ibrahim was holding her tightly, as if clinging to her was his only connection to life, his last fragment of hope.
I told him, “Habiba needs to sleep. Let her rest on the mattress.”
Immediately, he replied, “No. I’ll keep holding her. If we get bombed again, we’ll die together, or live together.”
Habiba’s tiny fingers curled around his. As if she understood.
As the room descended into a long silence, one question lingered: Would Habiba survive the occupation’s bombs? And even if she did, would she survive the hunger plaguing the children? There was no baby formula available, and no alternatives were to be found.
“Now, I fear hunger for Ibrahim and Habiba more than the bombing,” Nadine whispered.
The world has never felt more alien or cruel. And there was Habiba — the beloved — shining bright like a lonely star in a dark sky that was once radiant with many such stars, but from which entire constellations have now been extinguished.
Habiba deserves to live, to radiate her light and to be loved by her brother and mother, after they have lost everything.
In 14 months, Habiba has grown from an infant into a smart and beautiful toddler. Whenever I see her, I feel she symbolizes Gaza’s will to live and survive. However, like most children in Gaza, she suffers from a lack of milk and proper nutrition. May Habiba grow up healthy and strong, in a free and safe Gaza.
Translated from Arabic by The Lighthouse Collective
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