I had just gotten up.
The muezzin called for prayer and I got up.
By the time I had finished ablution,
the rocket fell.
I got up to do ablution for the prayer,
and then to drink tea, as I usually do.
By the time she started to pray, reciting al-Fatiha,
which is of course the beginning of our prayers
the bomb was already on its way.
The bomb targeted my son's house.
My house was next to his.
Everything was destroyed due to the magnitude of the blast.
If I was with them, I would have been killed.
If the wall had collapsed on me, it would have been impossible to get me out of the rubble alive.
Iman was in that room, where the window is, there, in the middle.
A chunk of concrete burst through the window;
not shrapnel, but a chunk of concrete.
She was standing there, praying, it struck her back,
and threw her forward on the closet in front of her.
It came from that area you just saw.
A chunk of concrete flew towards her and struck her;
while she was standing, praying, facing East.
It hit her on her back.
On the day of the bombing, he went to his room,
he slept in the corridor before.
He recently bought a new bedroom set:
a twin sized bed and a closet.
Ahmed slept in Rafat's house on the night of the strike,
because they planned to sell fruit from their cart from early morning.
I swear, I warned them about airstrikes,
but they said "no matter what, we can't escape our fate, and we are not doing anything wrong",
so they kept on going, facing each day as it came.
He said "I want to go sleep in my bedroom tonight".
He went to sleep. His mother tried telling him not to, in case there was bombing.
But he told her "God has written my fate whatever it is, it is inevitable, I want to die, that’s it".
And he went to his room and was martyred in the morning.
When the bomb fell, it killed Rafat and Ahmed,
and the entire family of Rafat, the entire house.
They bombed us for no reason, I wish there was a reason,
I wish we had someone wanted by the Israelis, or fugitives,
or someone from the resistance, so that there would have been a reason to bomb us.
The home of Rafat.
This was the main entrance.
Rafat's house was by the street,
their windows opened to the yard.
This was all garden.
Here there was a shed,
between our house and Rafat's,
and here was our house, inside, all of this.
The story was that sisters of Rafat's wife
were coming with a tuk-tuk to stay over at their house, that same night.
Each one was with kids; one had three, the other had four.
On the way their tuk-tuk broke down.
They tried to restart it, but couldn't.
So they decided to return home to al-Zawaida.
They planned to visit them the following day.
If they came, there would have been even more dead.
Shrapnel, so heavy.
For five days it was safe,
we thought we were safe,
if we knew it was dangerous for us, we wouldn't have stayed home.