Malak A. Tantesh & Emma Graham-Harrison
The Guardian / October 8, 2024
The Guardian tracks down families of great-great-grandfather and newborn baby girl.
Gaza’s health ministry has identified 34,344 Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks in the territory, publishing a list of names, ages, sex and ID numbers that cover more than 80% of Palestinians killed in the war so far.
The Guardian used this list to seek out the families of the oldest victim, a 101-year-old , and one of the very youngest, a newborn whose brief life lasted only two hours. Their stories are below.
Ahmed al-Tahrawi
Tahrawi’s first job was as a cook at a British army camp near his village, when his home was part of Mandatory Palestine and ruled from London.
He was born in 1922 in al-Masmiyya, which today exists only as a handful of ruins, fading memory and the name of an Israeli road junction about half an hour’s drive from Gaza’s northern border.
Its residents fled during the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, in which about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland after the creation of Israel.
Tahrawi was 26 that year, a father to two young sons. The family left their old life behind on foot, carrying little more than the key to the village home they would never see again, his grandson Abd al-Rahman al-Tahrawi said.
The boys did not survive the flight into exile, and so in Bureij, a refugee camp in Gaza, Ahmed al-Tahrawi and his wife started again, rebuilding their family, their home and their lives from scratch. The key to the Masmiyya house always hung on their wall, wherever they lived, a reminder of everything they had lost.
Tahrawi worked as a tailor then ran a small shop, and raised generations of a large and loving family. He lived long enough to meet his great-great-grandchildren, and was mentally and physically sharp until the end.
In a family video filmed a few months before the war, when he was already 100, he is trying to learn how to say “I love you” in English to his wife. As he mimics the unfamiliar words with a smile, the room fills with laughter. The key to the old house hangs on the wall behind him.
“He was going to leave us soon, but he did not go the normal way,” his grandson said.
Ahmed al-Tahrawi tells his wife ‘I love you’ in family footage before the war – video
Tahrawi’s single-storey home in Bureij had a corrugated asbestos roof, so at the start of the war he moved in with one of his daughters, hoping her concrete roof would offer more protection from Israeli airstrikes, but on 23 October, the daughter’s house was bombed.
Twelve people were killed immediately and eight were injured including Tahrawi. He was taken to hospital with internal bleeding, but because wards were overwhelmed and medical equipment in short supply doctors prioritised the young.
He died a week later, leaving his family bereft. “My grandfather did not belong to any military organisation, and he wasn’t guilty of any crime,” his grandson said. “He was just an old man who couldn’t harm anybody.”
At the start of the war in Gaza, Taharwi had 126 living descendants, though only 90 have survived this year. When he died, his oldest grandchild was 53, and his eldest great-great-grandchild was five.
Abd al-Rahman al-Tahrawi is 26, somewhere in the middle of the large clan, the same age his grandfather was when he fled to Gaza. Horrors he knew from old stories have now become his own life; the family have been displaced six times inside the strip and he no longer has his grandfather for support and inspiration.
“When I lost my grandfather I felt very sad, an extreme emptiness,” he said. “I was his favourite. I’ll miss him and his stories of adventures, his gatherings and the sound of his laughter.”
Waad Walid Samir al-Sabah
Waad was not yet born when an Israeli airstrike buried her mother, Salam al-Sabah, under an avalanche of rubble. The target of the airstrike on 15 February was a neighbours’ house, but the bomb was so big that it brought down parts of the Sabah family home too.
Rescuers raced to the site but had to work without heavy equipment so it took more than an hour to free Sabah, who was nine months pregnant. Already mother to four sons, she had been hoping to meet her first daughter within days.
Her uncle by marriage, Eid Sabah, is director of nursing at the Kamal Adwan hospital. He was on duty when his relatives were brought in, so covered in dust and soot from the explosion that he did not recognise them at first.
“I only realised who they were after some of them started screaming my name. I briefly froze from the shock but then I recovered enough to begin checks on them,” he said.
It was too late for his niece, but the unborn baby in her womb was still fighting for life, so doctors performed an emergency caesarian and rushed Waad to intensive care. She survived for two hours.
“What saddened me the most was the release of the birth certificate and the death certificate of Waad at the same time,” Eid Sabah said. Both mother and daughter could have been saved if they had got treatment faster, he added.
They were wrapped in a single shroud, with Salam holding Waad, and buried in a shared grave beside Salam’s 11-year-old son, Asid.
The family had fled their home in northern Tal al-Zaatar at the start of the war, after Israeli warnings to evacuate the area, and spent months shifting between relatives’ homes and shelters for displaced people.
It was an experience that echoed the stories Salam al-Sabah heard from her grandparents as a child. In 1948, they fled homes in the village of Burayr, about 12 miles north of the Gaza border in what is now Israel, and settled in Jabaliya refugee camp.
Sabah was five months pregnant with Waad at the start of the Israel-Gaza war, and shifting around got increasingly hard. When Israeli forces pulled out of their home area the family decided to return, even though the building was badly damaged inside and out.
It was at least their home, they reckoned, and relatively safe. Then on 15 February, Israel bombed a neighbouring property without warning, her uncle said.
“The house that was bombed was empty. They could have warned the owners of the neighbouring houses to evacuate. If they had, my relatives would still be alive and little Waad would have been filling the place with the sound of her laughter and crying.”
Malak A Tantesh is a reporter based in Gaza
Emma Graham-Harrison is the Guardian’s senior international affairs correspondent
