I now live in a rented apartment in al-Junainah neighborhood, after Israel bombed our house to smithereens. It was a three-story building with five apartments. The first and second floors had two apartments each, and my brothers lived in them with their families. I lived with my mother on the top floor.

On Thursday, 13 May 2021, at around 8:00 P.M., I was in my apartment with my brother Muhammad. Suddenly, I heard a missile whistling. I felt a tremor and was thrown in the air. Muhammad, who was standing next to me, flew and fell on some debris. More rubble fell on him. I stayed put for a few minutes until the debris, glass and stones stopped falling. When I got to my feet, I saw our building was still standing, but the missile had gone through the ceiling and landed on the ground floor. I went down the stairs, which were covered in debris but were still standing.

When I got to the ground floor, I saw my brother Yusef at the entrance to his apartment, covered in dust and smoke. I started shouting and calling for people to come save my family and get the wounded out from under the rubble. Some more people came. We looked behind the house to see if there was anyone wounded there. We searched with flashlights, because there was no electricity. I found Shaimaa, my brother Raed’s wife. She was dead. We pulled her out from under the rubble.

We kept looking and found Aya, my brother Muhammad’s wife. The shock wave had blown her into the house of our neighbors, the al-Hamaydah family. She was wounded and was holding her six-month-old baby, Ibrahim Muhammad a-Rantisi. He was dead.

We found my mother inside the apartment. She was dead, too. After looking for my brother Raed for two hours, we found him in the neighbors’ house. He was dead, too. He’d been blown about seven meters away from his apartment.

We barely managed to save my brother Hamzah, who was under the rubble. We worked for more than two hours to remove the debris that had fallen on my sister-in-law Asmaa, 27, my brother Yusef’s wife. She was trapped under bits of rubble, lumps of concrete and concrete posts. She was moderately injured. The rest of the family, the children and women, had made it out of the building and weren’t hurt.