CHICAGO: All 14-year-old Siwar Almadhoun wanted to do was play basketball. Her 9-year-old brother, Omar, dreamed of being a soccer star.
Their dreams died with them in the early hours of Friday, Nov. 24 when, as they slept, Israeli forces dropped a massive bomb on their home in Beit Lahia, in the Gaza Strip.
Their parents, Majed, 41, and Safa, 38, were also killed in the indiscriminate Israeli slaughter, along with siblings Reman, 18, who had just started college, and 7-year-old Ali, said Hani Almadhoun, Majed’s brother. He is an American citizen who works for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East office in Washington D.C., where he supervises charitable fundraising efforts to help needy families.
Only two of his brother’s children, daughters Roa and Salam, survived the carnage. They are married and live with their families in Rafah.
“Siwar, the basketball player, a 14-year-old girl, she loved basketball,” Almadhoun, 42, told Arab News as he struggled to speak through the grief. “The salt of this earth. A very sweet girl. She was killed. She did nothing. She was asleep, just like her family.
“And half of her mom, only one half, was recovered. Reman was recovered. Ali was recovered … their cat was buried and killed next to them. They adopted a cat named Lucky. A very unfortunate name. They liked to call her Cici. She was killed between the two kids because they loved to play with her so much.
“The only body that was found immediately was Omar. He flew through the window into the street 20 meters away. They went to bury him. They went to find Majed, and my mom knew her son was there. She was grieving and then, on top of that, (there were) no ambulances, no bulldozers were able to come to remove this rubble.”
The bodies of some of the occupants of the five-story apartment building the Almadhoun family owned were thrown from the building when it was destroyed but they could not be immediately recovered because of Israeli sniper fire and the missile strikes that continued to pound the civilian neighborhood.
Almadhoun said his father and mother spent three days searching for the remains of Majed, Safa and their grandchildren.
“They kept digging through the rubble of their destroyed homes but they could find nothing,” he said. “As they searched the area they recovered two and a half bodies that had been thrown by the explosion and were found in a destroyed home next door.
“(My mother) was desperate. She is heart-broken. Nobody is coming to the rescue. I have had meetings as high as the White House, the State Department and all these guys, and I can’t get safety to my family. It broke me.
“We all love our moms and dads. But she is just a lady whose son is buried and she can’t even have a minute with him. She can’t even take a picture with him because his face is swollen.”
Almadhoun said the search continues for Siwar’s body but his family’s efforts are hampered by the communications blackout imposed during the conflict by Israel, which has had total control of the Gaza Strip since 1967.
“There is heartbreak. There is sorrow,” he said. In response to suggestions that his relatives might have somehow had a connection with Hamas or were being used as human shields, he added: “This is personal … I know my family. There is no way that you could build a case against Majed, my brother.
“Majed loved his mom, honored his parents. He was very generous to help neighbors in need. We don’t know why they were killed.”
Almadhoun’s father owned a small grocery store a three-minute walk from the family home. Majed leased space for a kitchenware store in Sheikh Radwan, a 10 minute ride from Beit Lahia. Both shops have also been destroyed.
“All their savings were lost. My family is homeless,” Almadhoun said. “Remember the refugees from 1948.”
The massacre of his family, and the thousands of other civilians killed since the Israeli bombings and invasion began, are difficult to comprehend given their scale, he added.
According to official estimates, more than 14,000 Palestinians have been killed during the Israeli assaults and invasion, nearly 10,000 of whom were civilians with no connection to Hamas.
The attacks are not only partly funded by US taxpayers through US support for Israel, but the Israelis are using American-made weapons including massive 2,000-pound bombs capable of flattening an apartment building in a single strike.
Almadhoun said his brother and sister-in-law had been grieving the loss of 12 members of the latter’s family who were wiped out several weeks ago during the early stages of the Israeli onslaught.
They were killed by an attack in the Atwan area, a few miles south of Beit Lahia, Almadhoun said. The dead included Safa’s father and mother, five of her siblings and five of their young children.
“They lived in the Atwan area of northern Gaza,” he said. “The good volunteers in the family went and dug out the bodies. It was so horrific a scene, and a genocide
at their home, that they would not let Safa see her family because of the brutality: the body parts, the known pieces, the plastic bags.
“My brother Majed, her husband, went and collected the bodies and buried them. There was no proper burial because we know that Gaza is running out of spaces for graves and cemeteries are overflowing with dead bodies.”
The Almadhouns originally came from Ashkelon, which was in the Gaza District of Palestine before it was captured by Israel in 1948. The family fled Gaza to find work in the UAE, which is where Hani was born. But they returned to Beit Lahia to open their businesses there.
Almadhoun said the last time he saw his brother and his family was during a visit to Gaza in August this year. His parents and other surviving relatives are still in northern Gaza but cannot easily be reached.
“My dad is trying to be strong, trying to be normal,” he said. “I know he is not doing well but he is trying to be strong for everybody else. My mom cries and when she cries, I cry. I can’t take it. It is a lot.”