Naghm Karaja

Gaza -  Haneen Al-Mabhuh, a 34-year-old Palestinian mother, was left with nothing but memories. At exactly 3:30 a.m., the sound of an explosion shattered the night - and her life forever - when a missile struck her home north of Wadi Gaza, killing her four daughters and leaving her to bear the pain, with her body and soul both shattered.

She lost her four daughters

Haneen lives in one of the most dangerous areas of the Strip. In a weary voice, she says, “I never imagined that dawn would be the last thing my daughters saw. I had given birth to my baby girl, Rimi, just four months earlier, and I was still in recovery. That night, Rimi was sleeping on my chest - I could feel her tiny breaths - while my other three daughters were asleep in the next room.”

Everything was as usual for mothers in wartime - caution, prayer, hiding in corners - but the missile left no chance to escape. It turned the house into rubble in an instant. “I woke up to a sound like the end of the world. I found myself in the neighbors’ house. I didn’t know how I got there. I was half-conscious, but a voice inside me kept screaming: Where’s Rimi? My baby? She was sleeping on my chest… I just wanted to see her again, to hold her one more time.”

But Rimi was gone - and so were her three sisters. All four vanished at once, without a farewell. She buried her daughters, their dreams, their toys, and their laughter. “I spent years raising them with care,” Haneen says, her eyes fleeing the light like someone escaping a memory too painful to face. “I never left them for a moment.”

The explosion didn’t only take her daughters - it took her body as well. Haneen suffered severe injuries that led to the amputation of her right leg, complex fractures in her left leg that required metal implants, and damage to her left hand, which she can no longer move. Yet, the deepest wound she carries cannot be seen or healed.

In a trembling voice, she adds, “I still see their faces in my dreams… I see them running toward me, laughing, then fading into the fog. I wake up searching for them, but all I find is the wheelchair that carries me through my days. What hurts the most is that I couldn’t hold them in their final moments.”

 

“I want to walk to them… not be pushed to them”

Today, Haneen is bound to her wheelchair, trapped in a body burdened by loss. She waits for a chance at medical treatment. Doctors told her that a prosthetic leg could be possible, but such resources are unavailable in the devastated Gaza Strip. Looking at her amputated leg, she says, “I just want to heal… I don’t want pity. I want to walk again, to visit my daughters’ graves on my own feet - not in a chair pushed by others. I feel that if I ever stand again, it will be because they are waiting for me.”

Since the outbreak of the war on October 7, 2023, Gaza has been living through one of the most catastrophic humanitarian crises in modern history. According to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Health in Gaza and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, by mid-July 2025, the death toll had surpassed 90,000 - including around 17,900 children and over 11,000 women. These numbers are not just statistics - they are faces, names, and extinguished dreams. Mothers like Haneen continue to fight alone, waiting for a healing that never comes.

In Haneen Al-Mabhuh’s features lies the larger story of Gaza’s women - those who live on the edge of existence, who nurture pain as they once nurtured their children, and who endure suffering as if it were a destiny they cannot escape. In a quiet voice, as if speaking to the absent, she says, “I don’t hate life, despite all it has taken from me. I only ask it to give me a little more time - to find myself again.”

And so, Haneen Al-Mabhuh moves through her days between the agony of loss and the pain of her wounds, carrying the memory of a vanished home and the laughter of daughters who left before they learned what life means. In her gaze, the wounded homeland is reflected - a woman who was, and still is, the living embodiment of a generation of mothers who lost everything but their sacred, unending love.