The Gaza Diary

Until it’s over / A picture every day / To not forget them

ps:

On the 45th day of the bombing of Gaza, eight-year-old Waseem Abedrabou and his father Husam, left the family home for a night to stay with Husam’s mother.

“[His mother Abeer] doesn’t let Waseem sleep a metre away from her, but she let him sleep in that house that day,” said Dina Safi, Waseem’s aunt. “Husam wanted to see his family and Waseem wanted to see his grandma.”

Abeer would never see either of them again. An Israeli airstrike hit the house Waseem and Husam were staying in, devastating the large home, which housed five units of their extended family in Nuseirat refugee camp – south of the point in Gaza where the enclave’s population were ordered to evacuate.

Waseem’s uncle pulled the boy’s lifeless body from the rubble and carried him to his mother. But Husam’s body was buried beneath tonnes of heavy concrete.

Safi said Abeer screamed and collapsed when her son was brought to her, wrapped in a shroud, but she has been unable to process her pain because she does not know the fate of her husband, who still has not been found after days of digging.

Safi described her nephew as a child genius with an interest in Lego and computers inspired by his father’s work as an electrical engineer. He had won chess and engineering competitions at school and had shared with his mother his worries about losing his trophies if their home they left in Gaza City was bombed.

“I don’t want him to be a number, Waseem’s eyes were full of dreams,” she says.

Alongside the almost 15,000 people, including more than 6,000 children, killed in Gaza since 7 October, the Palestinian health ministry has reported another 6,000 Palestinians believed trapped under the rubble.

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The music is: Tranquillissimo  from the Symphony Nr3 by Henrik Górecki