The heartbreaking last moments of a 5-year-old girl killed in Gaza: “I’m afraid, come get me”

Buried in its ruins are the victims of this war and with them are buried the stories of how they were killed. A year after the October 7 attack, many questioned the killing of civilians by the fierce conflicts of Israeli forces with Hamas in Gaza. The 5-year-old Hind Rajab from Palestine was killed along with six members of her family in a car, while trying to escape the battles in Gaza City in January 2024. Her mother asks for justice. Her heartbreaking cries for help were recorded in the phone calls with emergency services. “I call on the whole world to stand by us… so that those who committed this brutal crime can answer,” her mother, Wissam Hamada, said in her temporary home in Gaza. “I Need Justice For My Daughter”. “Will you come get me? I am afraid’ On 29 January, the family of 5-year-old Hind Rajab decided to leave to escape the fighting in Tel al Hawa district of Gaza City. The girl entered a car with her uncle, wife and four children, while fighting in northern Gaza raged. Hind’s younger brother, Eiyad, did not want to get in the car and last minute did not enter. The car, a small black Kia, received Israeli fire near a fuel station 10 minutes after it started. “We saw them when they shot the car, but we didn’t think they were targeted, or we didn’t want to believe it,” said the girl’s mother. The family returned to her apartment. When they felt safe, they went out again without being sure what had happened to Hind and the rest of the family. Wissam was furiously trying to call everyone in the car. At noon, 15-year-old Layan answered the phone. She said everyone in the car was “sleeping” and that both she and Hind had been injured. “We told her to take off her scarf, tie it to the wound and stop the bleeding,” Wissam says. But Layan couldn’t move because the car was full of bodies. Layan gave the phone to Hind. When Wissam asked her daughter if she could get out of the car, Hind replied: “I wish, Mom, I wish. They’re all around me, Mom.” Crying followed. “They are getting closer, they are getting so close,” Hind told her mother panic. Then the line was closed. The family then contacted the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS), who tried to call the girls in the car. After a few attempts, Layan replied. “They shoot us,” said Layan. “The tanks are next to us”. Shots fired while a PRCS member was waiting on the line. “There was no reply from the child I was talking to. I didn’t even get her name,” she said. The conversation ends with a cry of agony being heard through fierce fire. With the phone line cut off, the Palestinian Red Crescent again ventured. This time Hind responded. She was alone in the car, everyone else was dead. For three hours and amid many calls, another PRCS representative, Rana Faqhi, tried to keep Hind on the line as he comforted her. “Please stay with me until someone comes, please don’t hang up the phone,” Hind begged Rana. “I will stay with you. I won’t. I’ll stay with you,” said Rana. Wissam was also talking to her daughter on the phone. “I told her, lower your voice, or they’ll shoot you like they shot Layan”. Then the Red Crescent organized a group call and Wissam had contact with her daughter, who was constantly asking for someone to come get her. As night fell, Hind, who feared the dark, became more and more concerned. “Will you come get me?” he pleaded. “I’m so scared, please come”. While all this was happening, the Palestinian Red Crescent was frantically trying to coordinate a rescue, requesting permission from the Israeli authorities to send an ambulance. After waiting hours they made it. PRCS says the license finally came and took the green light to send an ambulance. The ambulance departed Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City at 5.40pm. The two paramedics on board the ambulance, Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed al Madhoun, remained in contact with PRCS members throughout the route. By 6 in the afternoon the ambulance crew was near the family car and informed that the lights had been left on. “There he is (the girl),” said a paramedic, just before communication was cut abruptly by gunshots. Both paramedics were killed. On February 10, once access to the area became safer, both the ambulance and the car in which Hind and the Hamada family were aboard were located. One of Hind’s uncles, Sameer Hamada, faced the ultimate tragedy. “I found their car. I found my brother. His wife was next to him and we found Layan, Raghad, Sarah, Mohammad and Hind in the back. [ Their bodies had] decomposed due to the long time,” Sameer said. He also found the burned ambulance, in which there were “only bones”. Sameer pulled the dead out of the family car and buried them in a cemetery near their home. Information from Skynews