"They killed my family": the testimony of the girl who walked through the flames of Gaza
The six-year-old girl survived the attack, but almost her entire family died.
BarcelonaIsrael's war on the Gaza Strip has been leaving behind images for months. In recent weeks, numerous photos of the creatures with visible nutritional problems and with their faces distorted by hunger as they wait for their plates to be filled with humanitarian aid that is still arriving in dribs and drabs. This Monday, a harrowing video shot on the ground went viral, showing a girl trying to flee the flames caused by an Israeli bombing of a school in Gaza City. The Gaza Strip government has denounced a "brutal massacre" at the Fahmi Al-Jarjawi school, where at least 36 people have died, 18 of whom were children.
Israel bombed this center, which housed refugees, in the middle of the night. Several missiles fired at the building set fire to the classrooms where the displaced people, many of whom were families with children, were sleeping. Images of the silhouette of a girl walking engulfed in flames have spread on social media and in the media. According to Efe, the girl's name is Ward Jalal al-Shiek Jalil, she is about six years old, and she survived the attack. But the price is extremely high: she lost her six siblings and her mother in the fire. Her father is in critical condition.
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The girl's body was found under a slab, covered by the charred remains of others. In a video broadcast by Al Jazeera—the only international media outlet with journalists on the ground—the girl is seen, awake and conscious, on the shoulders of one of the paramedics. It feels like someone is saying her father is alive and in an ambulance.
The man asks her: "Where is your mother?" "My mother was there," she says, pointing toward the attacked building. He also asks her about her brother, but she says she doesn't know anything. In another video also broadcast by the Qatari network, she is carried by a man wearing a journalist's vest and explains that a missile hit and the building was set on fire. "They killed my family," she says.
At least 36 people were killed and more than 50 injured in the bombing of the Gaza City school, according to the Gaza Strip's Health Ministry. According to Al Jazeera, the school received no warning before the attack, and rescue teams said they spent hours searching for people under the rubble. "Many people died and many were injured. Some of the dead were my relatives. There were too many injured for ambulances to reach. There were body parts everywhere," Bushra Rajab, who was at the school at the time of the bombing, told Al Jazeera.
The Israeli military has alleged, as it has in the past and without providing evidence, that the school functioned as a command and control center for Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants, from where they supposedly gathered information for their attacks. The reality is that Gaza's schools have largely become shelters for those displaced by the Israeli military offensive—90% of the population—which has already caused nearly 54,000 deaths since October 2023. 60 deaths in several areas of Gaza. In a statement, the Israeli armed forces claim to have attacked more than "200 targets" in Gaza in the last 48 hours, and announced an "unprecedented attack."
Likewise, satellite images confirmed by Al Jazeera showed Israeli troops surrounding the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip and another nearby facility, Al Awda Hospital in Tel al Zaatar, an area that has been subjected to constant bombardment. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that since the start of the war, Israel has carried out 700 attacks against health infrastructure.
The Gaza Strip government accuses Israel of "deliberately and systematically" attacking shelters and centers for displaced people "in flagrant violation of all international and humanitarian laws" and stresses that these attacks have completely collapsed the Gaza health system. "Medical personnel are under enormous pressure, facing severe shortages of medical supplies, border crossings closed to the wounded and sick, and the impediment to fuel, food, medicine, and treatment, which exacerbates the humanitarian catastrophe in the Strip," it said in a statement.