RAFAH — Umm Raja Barbakh, a Gazan woman in her 60s, had a particular request to her children and grandchildren amid Israel’s relentless bombing campaign: when we flee, let’s choose different destinations.
The reason is as simple as it is grim: She doesn’t want all her progeny in the same place for fear that the whole family could be annihilated.
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“The decision to disperse my children and grandchildren is a way to limit the chance that the whole family is gone in case of a bombing on a single place,” she explained. “Their presence in more than one place will reduce the risk of the family disappearing completely.”
Indeed, that’s what happened with her sister, who was killed in an Israeli bombing along with her children and grandchildren.
Barbakh’s family has instead scattered in different locations in the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah in southern Gaza. The oldest of her four children has sheltered in a tent in the Mawasi area in Rafah along with his seven children. A second son and daughter were living with their children in different locations in Rafah. The fourth lives with his five children in Khan Younis.
Painful experience
Barbakh insisted on dividing her family after an Israeli air raid flattened her sister’s house in the Naser neighborhood in Rafah earlier this year. Her sister’s entire family of 17 people were killed in the strike.
They were buried one after another in front of me.
“The killing of my sister and all of her children was shocking and painful,” she said. “They were buried one after another in front of me.”
Israel launched its war against Hamas in Gaza after the militant group’s unprecedented, cross border attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. Hamas attack killed at least 1,200 people including civilians and the militants took at least 240 hostages.
Israel’s bombing campaign and ground offensive has killed more than 34,700 Palestinians, two thirds of them are women and children, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza.
“No one survived”
Like Barbakh, the Hamdan family in Khan Younis adopted the same method. They are currently spread out across southern Gaza.
“Since the first day of the war, I asked my six sons and their wives to leave the house and go to their relatives and uncles,” said Abu Nader Hamdan, a Palestinian man in his 50s.
He made his decision after he witnessed the killing of an entire family, Abu Salama, in Khan Younis. They were all in the same house when an Israeli airstrike bombed it. “No one from that family survived,” Hamdan recalled.
“If the place we sought refuge was bombed, it is true that we will die, but the rest of the family members who moved to other places will remain alive, and thus the family will continue,” he said.
Hamdan described extremely dire living conditions in Gaza especially when there were bombings and explosions in areas where his children are sheltering.
“We are living through difficult days… especially when the places where we are divided are bombed and there is no communication,” he said.
But sending offspring in different directions was seen as an existential necessity for the family: “To avoid being annihilated.”
