A 7-year-old girl, who lives in a Negev desert community that is home to Arab Bedouins, was clinging to life in a hospital after the attack.
Sunday was a quiet day in the hospital waiting room. There were no large groups of family members or patients. Israel’s air defenses had just stopped a large-scale attack by Iran, which only hurt one person seriously.
There was no sign of a crisis outside the pediatric intensive care unit at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, which is in the southern part of Israel. A mother who was gasping for air walked out of the ward with her face contorted as the doors to the ward opened. Then she quickly gave in to her feelings and fell into a chair, crying.
There wasn’t much damage done to Israel overnight, but this family was definitely hurt very badly. Amina al-Hasoni, 7, was barely alive and was the only major victim of the Iranian attack. Some of her family members said that she might have been saved too if Israel’s system wasn’t so unfair.
In the Negev desert, there are about 300,000 Arab Bedouins. A fifth of them live in villages that Israeli authorities don’t recognize. These towns have had trouble for a long time without planning or basic services like running water, sewers, and power because they are not recognized by the state. Many people have asked the government many times but still can’t get into bomb bunkers.
The Hasoni family lives in one of these communities. They share a hilltop in the village of al-Fur’ah in the Negev with a group of houses that are not related to each other. It was Saturday night and rocket sirens went off. Amina’s uncle Ismail said he felt stuck because he had nowhere to go.
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Before there was a big blast, booms in the sky told air defenses to stop the missiles. He then heard his sister yelling, and “I started running,” he said.
Ismail, who is 38 years old, found his sister holding Amina outside of her house. Amina was bleeding from the head. Her family ran out the front door to get away from the bombs. But Amina didn’t make it. She slept in a back room with pink walls painted with butterflies.
A piece of the missile went through the house’s thin metal roof and made a hole with sharp metal edges. Not far from the door, where Amina was knocked out, it hit something hard.
He said, “I think it hit her as she was running away.”
He told her that he picked up Amina from his sister and held her in his arms. After that, Ismail found a car that sped her to the hospital, which was more than 40 minutes away on a rough, twisting road where camels sometimes crossed.
Then, when Amina was already on her way, he went inside the house and said he saw a big, black piece of shrapnel about the size of a jelly jar. “There was blood,” he said, pointing to a puddle that had changed into a stream that went from the tile floor to the front door.
The orange-patterned floors were clean by Sunday afternoon. Only one of the dozen or so cousins there could say who did it: “It was bad for the children to see” all the blood. He hasn’t gone back inside, though.
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“It’s hard,” he said, still having blood on his pants and boots. A pink Minnie Mouse blanket and a small black-and-white girl’s dress were hung on a family clothesline not far from where he was sitting.
He also said, “We could have built shelters here.”
He didn’t believe that what happened to Amina was just bad luck.
He said, “It’s part of the rules.” “There’s nothing we can do.”
The piece of rocket that hit Amina’s house was one of more than 150 that police bomb disposal teams found in the area on Sunday. The family said that the piece that hit their house had been taken away by police. Teams searched the desert for hours for debris and carried away huge pieces of bent metal. This was done all over Israel.
There is a military base called Nevatim not far from the Hasoni home. This base was supposedly attacked by Iran and only slightly damaged, according to Israeli officials.
That doesn’t make Amina’s father, Muhammad, feel better. He spent the morning at the hospital taking turns being by her bedside. He told her that he didn’t say much to her and just said her name again.
His 14 children include Amina, who “likes to laugh and have fun all the time,” said Muhammad, 49. She’s a good student, but she doesn’t always listen to directions because she has a “strong personality,” he said. She also really enjoys drawing.
He said that what Iran was doing was “inhumane.”
He said without doubt, “May God destroy them.”
With Inputs from nytimes!
