Shaban al-Dalu sleeping in his tent in the courtyard of the central Gaza hospital, still recovering from wounds from an attack A week ago Israel attacked a mosqueWhen a new attack came, a situation of hell arose.
The 19-year-old university student and his 38-year-old mother, Alaa al-Dalu, were among the five killed in the fire. A tent camp sheltering hundreds of Palestinian families In the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the central city of Deir al-Balah. Dozens of people including children were seriously burnt.
Al-Dalu and his mother were sleeping in a tent with his father and three siblings when the attack occurred around 1:30 a.m. on Monday. Mohammed al-Dalu, his fifth brother, was sleeping nearby at his salesman’s desk when the explosion startled him. He found his father and uncle, who lived in a tent next door, struggling to get their families out of the fire.
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Father Ahmed al-Dalu said he managed to save his two sons and daughter, but could not save his wife or eldest child, Shaaban. “My son was being burned in front of me,” he said, speaking in hospital with burn marks on his face. “I accepted God’s will in every sense of the word.”
The Israeli military said, without providing evidence to support its claim, that it targeted terrorists hiding among the displaced. It was the seventh Israeli attack on the hospital complex since March; Three of them occurred in September, according to Doctors Without Borders, which supports the hospital.
The war began when Hamas attacked southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapping about 250 hostages. More than 42,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli counterattacks, according to Gaza’s health ministry, with the ministry saying more than half of those killed were women and children. This has displaced more than 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people at various times.
During the war, the military repeatedly raided hospitals and attacked crowded shelters and tent camps, alleging that Hamas fighters were using them as staging grounds for attacks, without showing evidence.
Monday’s strike caused chaos at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, as firefighters and displaced people tried to put out the blaze for hours using small fire extinguishers and buckets of water. Several secondary explosions occurred, but their cause could not be known. The courtyard was covered with burnt debris of sheds and tents made of wood and plastic sheets, with people’s belongings inside.
“It is a scene of devastation. “The tents caught fire while people were sleeping,” said Eliza Sabatini, a nurse with Doctors Without Borders who was working at the hospital.
More than 60 people, including 10 children and 8 women, were injured, most of whom suffered severe burns. A man was crying with a bandaged child in his arms. Another small child with a bandaged leg was given a blood transfusion on the floor of the packed Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, where many of the injured were taken.
Shaaban al-Dalu, who will turn 20 on Wednesday, memorized the Quran as a child and looked after his siblings.
A university student studying computer science, he posted videos on social media and told people his family’s stories of displacement and his dream of leaving Gaza. In a video posted in March, filmed from his tent in the hospital courtyard, he said his family had fled their home in Gaza City’s Rimal neighborhood soon after the war began in October last year. Since then, he said, they have moved five times to avoid fighting.
“We live in a very difficult situation,” he said in the video. He started an online fundraiser in hopes of earning enough money to take his family to Egypt. As of Wednesday, it had raised more than $24,200 — although no one has been able to leave Gaza since Israeli troops seized the crossings with Egypt in May.
“I had big dreams, but war ruined them,” he wrote on his GoFundMe page. “It seems as if time has stopped in Gaza, and we are trapped in a never-ending nightmare.”
His brother Mohammed said that on October 6, he was reciting the Quran at a mosque near the hospital when an Israeli airstrike hit the place of worship. Shaban suffered a head injury that required 11 stitches and was recovering in a tent at the time of Monday’s strike.
Shaaban’s father and three siblings in the tent suffered severe burns, some of them with burns up to 70% of their bodies, Mohammed said. The body of her 11-year-old brother Adbel-Rahman was completely covered in bandages, she said, and her sister’s back and the left side of her face were badly burned.
Shaaban’s uncle, Abdel-Hayy al-Dalou, recalled how the families thought they were safe when they arrived at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
“We made tents – me and my brother – and took shelter here,” he said. “We denied that it would be bombed because it is a hospital.”
After saving his wife and two daughters, Abdel-Hay reached his brother’s camp in hopes of saving his nephew and sister-in-law.
“We couldn’t help them,” he said. “We were helpless.”
published – October 18, 2024 11:38 am IST