They Called It a Precise Strike, Here Is What It Did to My Baby
Part II
This is a continuation of a story I shared before. You can read the first part here.
1:21 AM Istanbul | Gaza in slow collapse
There is a dark corner in my heart I usually avoid, but tonight it has followed me here, dragging back July 13, 2014. I had just finished covering Israeli bombings in southern Gaza. It was Ramadan and my taxi driver and I were still fasting, but we felt more heartbreak than hunger or thirst.
My coverage started and ended with a massacre targeting the Kaware family. Nine members were annihilated, the grandmother was the sole survivor. When I arrived, she was in total shock. She told me that on her way to the supermarket, her phone rang. An Israeli soldier was on the other end, telling her the family had less than thirty minutes to evacuate the house.
The grandmother shouted frantically, her voice cracking with each scream. Her words didn’t reach her sons and grandchildren, but the terror in her voice did.
She described reaching the entrance door in seconds. Half a minute, maybe? The longest thirty seconds of her life. She saw their faces, etched with concern, gathering at the top of the stairwell. And then, the missiles struck, killing everyone who had gathered, and everyone who hadn’t.
It took thirty seconds, not minutes. It was a deliberate assassination, with one survivor spared to tell the world about Israel’s savagery.
Nine members of her family, her sons and her grandchildren, all gone. In the aftermath, she blamed herself: What if I had hurried? What if I had screamed louder? What if I had been inside with them? I wish I had been.
When that bloody day finally ended, the Maghrib Athan echoed louder than the roar of the zanana (warplanes). I knew that nothing I documented would stop this slaughter. The world didn’t care about the Kaware family’s final moments. But God, I did. I felt their pain crushing me. I needed to hold my children so desperately.
As I rushed home, my cameras slamming against my chest. They felt heavier than usual, carrying nothing compared to the weight pressing down on my ribs. The street to our building was blocked, a house had been struck and collapsed, taking a mother and her two babies with it. Even now, their screams live behind my eyes and echo through my sleep.
I dropped everything and ran up the stairs to our second floor apartment. The climb had never felt longer. I used my phone’s flashlight to look for my children. When I reached the door, the power was out.
My eldest, two and a half years old, was in her grandmother’s lap. My youngest daughter, one year old, was soaked in her own blood. I saw her soft pink baby blanket first, crumpled in the corner, dark stains visible across the fabric. I reached out, running my fingertips across it, then looked at my hand, covered in deep red. I turned and saw her on the other side of the room. Blood poured from her mouth, a wound I couldn’t immediately see. I didn’t know then that Israel had dropped a thermobaric bomb, one that left my daughter’s body perfectly intact on the outside while she bled internally. I was never going to find the cut or stop the bleeding. According to the Israeli occupation forces, it was a “precise, targeted strike.”
I dragged her into the bathtub we used to store water during the war and climbed in with her, submerging us both. I held her cold, unnervingly quiet body. She could no longer scream. I called the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem to tell them an American citizen baby was injured in Gaza. They hung up on me. When I dialed again, thinking we had disconnected, a man with broken Arabic loudly told me the consulate refuses to help because I shouldn’t have been in Gaza. I argued that I am Palestinian and she is my child, but he hung up again. The message was perfectly clear. The U.S. consulate expected me to let my family be murdered. American or not, my baby simply did not count.
Through a lazy, overdue miracle, I evacuated my daughter out of Gaza myself three weeks after the strike. There were no ambulances waiting and no sirens cutting through the heavy noise, only the quiet absence of help as I wrapped my arms around what remained of her fragile strength and carried her forward.
That memory has never faded with time. It clings to me still, like thick smoke lodged deep within my bones, forever binding the weight of that day to the moment when Israel launched its fifth attempt to assassinate Mohammed al-Deif. They missed him entirely, yet in that same strike they did not miss us.
My daughter survived, though her injury stole the first seven years of her childhood in slow, painful increments. Widad Asfura, a twenty-seven-year-old mother, did not survive. Her three-year-old daughter Sarah and her seven-month-old son Ali also did not survive. They were buried together in the rubble and reduced to collateral damage in a war that has never truly counted Palestinian lives as worthy of sparing. In that single airstrike, more than 90 Palestinians were killed and over 300 were injured, many critically.
To the genocidal state of Israel, and to a world that chose to look away, my daughter was no different from the others, just another shadow among the broken concrete, another life not worth the effort to spare.
2:38 AM Istanbul | Gaza trembling quietly
I used to believe God wouldn’t let a baby die. Then I corrected myself. God didn’t drop the bombs on her. Israel did.
Israel made her bleed. Israel broke her bones. Israel shattered her body from the inside out. And the United States handed them the weapon to kill an American baby.
5:00 PM Istanbul | Gaza drifting toward dusk
After a decade in Washington, D.C., I’ve learned one thing: cowards in suits make the rules. Revolution won’t come from Capitol Hill. It will arrive there.
6:45 PM Istanbul | Gaza still alive, still listening
If you’re still reading this, you’ve slipped too deep into my world. I never told the full story of what happened that day. I danced around it, like I do with the worst things. And it remains the case: I can never tell you everything that happened that day. But I told you what didn’t. We didn’t survive that day. We endured and continue to do so.
Now you are a witness, and I don’t regret telling you any of this, even if you choose to look away.
It’s time for me to call Gaza, so I dial like I’m spinning an old rotary phone, and then I wait to tell my family another lie, and another truth. I’ll lie and say help is coming and that the world didn’t forget about them. And I will honestly tell them there will be a free Palestine soon.
Because I know I’m no longer fearing for Palestine. It’s here to stay.
As for the rest of the world? I’m not so sure.