Ahmad Abu Foul
1 March 2024
A 40-year-old father of four from Jabalya Refugee Camp, Ahmad spoke about the bombing of a building in which he lost one of his wives and three of his four children, and about the hunger in northern Gaza
I’m a paramedic, and I’ve been working nonstop and under a lot of pressure ever since 8 October 2023. I would come home just for a few minutes to see my children, ‘Ula, 14, Yusef, 12, Muhammad, 4, and Rasil, who is seven months old, and my two wives, Islam and Shaimaa. Sometimes, I would bring food with me. I’d stay just long enough to see everyone was okay and put my mind at ease, and then go right back to work.
My job as a paramedic is very dangerous. On 7 November, the Israeli army fired a missile and hit my ambulance while I was inside with a other crew members. The damage was quite light, but the entire area of the Kamal ‘Udwan Hospital was under an Israeli airplane and tank attack. The destruction there was immense and all the streets in the area were blocked with rubble from buildings that were bombed.
On 7 December, while I was on duty, I was told my family’s building was hit by gunfire and that members of my family who were home were injured. I rushed home, even though there was still shooting in the area and it was very dangerous. I saw that three floors in our family’s building were damaged, but only lightly. I managed to get everyone who needed medical attention out and took them to Kamal ‘Udwan Hospital in five donkey-drawn carts.
My brother Sakher was killed that day in Jabalya R.C., but I didn’t find out until the next day. I went there to take the body and carried him on my shoulders to the Kamal ‘Udwan Hospital compound, where I buried him. I was in a terrible state, but I had to go back to work immediately.
When my family members were discharged from the hospital, they went home because the damage to the building was minor. But on 12 December, the building was bombed again. This time, I lost 28 people from my family, including my first wife, Islam, and three of my four children. Another 26 family members were injured, some severely and others moderately or lightly. I tried to get bodies out from under the rubble. It was awful. I saw the body of my four-year-old son Muhammad and of my nephew, who was just a child too. But the shooting continued and I couldn’t get them out. I had to run away.
I only went back a few days later, on 17 December, with some colleagues. We took the rubble off the bodies by hand. We did all the work with our hands and with the help of some light equipment. In the end, we managed to get out the bodies of Muhammad, my wife Islam, my father, my two sisters and my aunt. I did it emotionlessly. I can’t feel anything anymore, and that made it possible for me to get them all out. After that, I buried them next to each other in al-Falujah cemetery in Jabalya R.C.
On 20 December, the army invaded the area of Kamal ‘Udwan Hospital. The soldiers took all the women, children and elderly people out and made them walk about two kilometers. I was arrested with several other people and held for 12 hours, handcuffed and blindfolded. I wished I was dead.
Bodies are still being extracted from our building. It took me 25 days after the bombing to get out the bodies of my daughter Rasil, 7, and my niece, who was also just a little girl. I found her body with the head missing. It wasn’t until a month after the bombing that I managed to get the bodies of the rest of my family, including my son Yusef.
In early February 2024, I managed to move my mother, my wife Shaimaa and my daughter ‘Ula, 14, who survived the attack but was wounded in the head and leg, to a Red Crescent hospital in Khan Yunis. A week later, on 9 February, the Israeli army invaded the hospital and arrested my wife. My mother and daughter stayed in the hospital and are still there. I heard the army was surrounding the hospital and soldiers were raiding rooms, so they probably went into their rooms too. I can’t get in touch with them right now because communication is down. As for my wife, I don’t know where they’re keeping her. I haven’t heard from her since the arrest.
In the meantime, I’m trying to take care of my orphaned nephews. We are experiencing real hunger here in the northern Gaza Strip. There hasn’t been any food for a week now, except for a few sweets. The only supplies come in trucks from the south.
I walk more than five kilometers, from Jabalya R.C. to al-Nabulsi Square, to get a sack of flour and some food portions they hand out there, but it’s not enough. The children are dizzy and exhausted with hunger all the time. The airdropped food isn’t even enough to satisfy a small child. We’re starving to death, and no one is spared. I’ve seen people become skin and bones, and children die of starvation. What you see in the media is only a fraction of the tragedy that’s taking place here.
Things have become really dangerous here. Some time ago, after I picked up a bag of flour from the aid trucks in al-Kuwait Square east of Gaza City, someone suddenly came up to me holding a knife. I dropped the sack and ran.
But what happened at a-Nabulsi Square on 29 February is something I will never forget. I went there along with thousands of others to get sacks of flour, and when we got near the trucks, we came under massive fire. A lot of people were injured from the shooting, and some were killed. It was a shocking sight. Horrifying. The blood seeped into the flour, and the phrase “bread dipped in blood” became a reality.
People only went there to get food for their families. Some came back injured and others didn’t come back at all. All I want is to survive the hunger that’s killing us all in northern Gaza. At least save the children, who have been starving here for so long.
Shaimaa Abu Foul was released from detention on 4 April 2024 and sent back to the Gaza Strip.
* Testimony given to B’Tselem field researcher Olfat al-Kurd over the phone on 1 March 2024