Yasmine and Mohammed, Abeer told me, suffered their own personal nightmare before the war began.
It took Yasmine three years and the help of in vitro fertilization to get pregnant. In her sixth month, her face and body swelled up and her blood pressure skyrocketed. She had to deliver early to save her life, and was lucky to get a transfer permit to an East Jerusalem hospital; baby Sophia weighed only 600 grams, or 1.3 pounds, had incomplete organs, and spent three months in an incubator.
“It was three months of hell,” Abeer recalled. Yasmine was not allowed to stay in Jerusalem, she said, and had to reapply for permits each week to visit. The baby gained little weight, and eventually needed open-heart surgery. Finally, they were allowed back to Gaza.
Sophia was still very sick, and Yasmine took her to the hospital regularly. When she was 10 months old, she spiked a high fever, and died. This was three months before the start of the war. Yasmine, Abeer noted, “was traumatized already, and then this happened.”
The couple lived in Gaza City’s Al Nasser neighborhood, which was hard hit in the early weeks of the war. They followed the Israeli military’s evacuation order and spent three weeks at her parents’ home. “The artillery shelling didn’t stop for an hour, she didn’t sleep for the three weeks,” Abeer said Yasmine told her. “It was so risky, shrapnels were everywhere.”
Yasmine and Mohammed then headed south. They rode a donkey cart along the corridor Israel had established, spent two weeks in a tent outside the Nuseirat refugee camp, then stayed at a relative’s home in the mid-Gaza town of Deir al Balah.
“She stayed there for two nights, and said, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to go to Rafah,’” Abeer recalled. “That night, the house next to where she was staying was destroyed, and she was rescued from under the rubble.”
Once in Rafah, Yasmine heard Egypt was letting people in — but that it cost $6,000 to get your name on the list. That’s when she decided to try GoFundMe; a friend in the U.S. created the campaign because it requires an international bank account.
“Her decision was to leave and not to go back to Gaza,” Abeer explained. “She said, ‘Enough of being traumatized. Maybe I will decide to be a mother again and this won’t be in Gaza.’ The place is full of negative memories.”
Abeer’s relatives created a new WhatsApp group on Oct. 8 titled “Abu Hussam Family for Wars and Battles” (Abu Hussam is her and Yasmine’s father).
The family relies on Abeer to share news of the war, including Israeli announcements of evacuation orders, safe passage zones and humanitarian aid, because they rarely have enough internet connection to download the information. Lately, Abeer said, they have been using eSIM cards, which cost about $4 each for a gigabyte, and allow connection through Israeli or Egyptian cell service. The posts are how Abeer knows they are still alive.
The other day, a niece went for a walk in Gaza’s old city and shared photos of an Ottoman-era Turkish bathhouse and mosque hit by Israeli airstrikes. A nephew recently posted an eight-second video from the flattened seaport.
Then there are pictures of the youngest in the clan, Farah, who was 3 months old when the war began. In a yellow shirt that matches the frosting on the cake her mom managed to make for her 4-month birthday; standing with the help of a toy; covering her ears to drown out the noise of the war outside.
“When they shave, when they take showers, they send photos,” Abeer told me. “We joke sometimes. Every time we send a happy picture, we caption it, ‘Despite the hard circumstances.’”
