The Electronic Intifada 17 April 2025
Hiba with Elias on her lap as well as Ibrahim, Lana and Ella.
Israel’s genocidal attacks against Gaza have redefined the lower boundaries of what people once thought was possible to happen to them.
Before October 2023, Hiba al-Namnam, 32, never imagined she would be living in an ad hoc shelter in a UN school in the heart of the Jabaliya refugee camp.
She certainly did not expect to be responsible for four orphaned children.
On 27 October 2023, Hiba’s family, her parents and two siblings, evacuated their home in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip just as Israel’s military was poised to invade on the ground.
Hiba refused to go, she told The Electronic Intifada in March in Jabaliya, speaking in the shell of a classroom at an UNRWA school where she and her sister’s four children now have sought shelter.
There was just one mat on the floor in an otherwise bare room that bore the unmistakable scars of fire damage.
She spoke with composure though her eyes never left the children, watching them warily. In her lap sat the youngest, Elias.
She was not alone for long. A few days after her parents had left, Hiba was joined by her older sister Alaa, 34, Alaa’s husband, Raed, 42, and their four children: Ibrahim, 14, Lana, 12, Ella, 10, and Elias, 8, who themselves had had to flee their home in Beit Lahiya.
Their presence was a welcome source of strength and hope to Hiba.
“It’s terrifying to be alone under the constant Israeli bombardment, with missiles, fire and hatred raining down on you,” she said.
But the Israeli bombardment only intensified, forcing Hiba and her sister’s family to seek refuge in a school just a five-minute walk away where hundreds of families had already taken shelter.
No time to mourn
On 26 January 2024, Raed, who had been fetching water and food for his children, disappeared.
“His phone was off,” Hiba said. “We had no idea where he had gone. The airstrikes never stopped, and the war was getting fiercer by the day.”
She, Alaa and friends scoured every possible place – hospitals, makeshift clinics and all over northern Gaza – fearing Raed had been injured or killed.
“His absence made our suffering even worse,” Hiba said.
Twenty-two days after he disappeared and once the Israeli troops there withdrew, Raed’s decomposing body was found near his home in Beit Lahiya.
“My sister Alaa recognized him only by his clothes and shoes,” Hiba said. “They killed Raed in cold blood and left his wife and four children to face the horrors of war alone.”
Determined to support her grieving sister and her children, Hiba resolved not to leave their side.
The school-turned-shelter became their only refuge, and, as the Israeli genocide escalated, the humanitarian disaster deepened. Israel’s violence was soon accompanied by a deadly famine that gripped northern Gaza for months.
Then more grief. On 6 October 2024, just after Israel had re-invaded the north, Alaa and her children decided to venture back to their home in Beit Lahiya to retrieve clothes. But an Israeli artillery shell struck before they could make it back.
Alaa was killed instantly. All four of her children were injured in the attack.
“I was waiting for them at the school. I had a bad feeling. When I heard they had been hit, I ran to Kamal Adwan Hospital,” Hiba recalled.
“I couldn’t bear to see my sister wrapped in a white shroud. I didn’t even get to say goodbye before her burial.”
DIscharged and determined
But there was no time for mourning. “The children had no one left but me.”
Ibrahim had suffered a severe injury to his right eye. Ella was at risk of losing the sight in one eye. Lana sustained moderate leg injuries, while Elias had a minor wound in his right foot.
But Israel had killed both their parents, seeing them join the ranks of the more than 38,000 other children in Gaza who have lost one or both parents as a result of Israel’s genocide, and leaving them in the care of their aunt.
Looking back, Hiba realizes that everything that had happened had led her to this moment.
“The day Alaa died, standing in the hospital beside her injured children, I finally understood why God kept me in northern Gaza when my family fled south,” she said, about her parents and other siblings who had been displaced south.
Her new role started sooner than it should have. With hospitals overflowing with casualties, Ibrahim and Elias had been transferred to Al-Awda Hospital, a 10-minute walk from Kamal Adwan.
Braving the bombings, Hiba moved between the two, staying by the children’s side and ensuring they received treatment.
Eventually, with no space left, the children were discharged into Hiba’s care, Ella’s eye still hurting, with doctors warning that she needed treatment that was simply unavailable in Gaza.
A further intensification of Israel’s aggression in the north forced the five to relocate yet again, this time finding shelter in another UN school, this in the Beach refugee camp, about 4 kilometers from Jabaliya.
Strength
For weeks, Hiba provided for the children, securing water, food and medical care. When the ceasefire started in mid-January, the five of them returned north only to find their former homes destroyed.
With nowhere else to go, they returned to the school in Jabaliya, salvaging a burnt-out classroom room to live in.
There, the children try to hold on to themselves. Ibrahim dreams of becoming a doctor. But he still needs treatment for the injury to his eye, as does Ella, a cheerful girl who loves drawing, but who faces the risk of losing her eyesight.
Lana, a gentle and caring child who loves reading, is trying to be strong for her younger siblings. Elias, the youngest, misses his mother. He is, he said, while sitting in Hiba’s lap, “lost” without her.
As for Hiba, she is waiting for travel permits for Ella and Ibrahim so they can receive the medical treatment they need, only available abroad.
For her, Israel’s genocidal aggression, her grief, her losses, her displacement and the struggle merely to survive, might all have overwhelmed her had it not been for her newfound role.
“I draw strength from Ibrahim, Lana, Ella and Elias every day. They have taught me what responsibility truly means,” Hiba said.
Imad Abu Saif is a journalist in Gaza.
