Fraught with fear, six-year-old Hind Rajab made a desperate call to the Palestinian Red Crescent. She made a desperate attempt to leave the city in a car with her aunt, uncle, and three cousins to escape Israeli forces.
“I am so scared,” she reportedly said on the phone. “Call someone to come get me, please.”
We don’t know yet if she indeed received some timely help. Even if she did, it was all too late.
Hind has been found dead along with several of her relatives and two paramedics who tried to rescue her. According to the BBC, they could’ve succumbed to fire from Israeli tanks.
Hind’s mother, Wissam, had been waiting for her daughter “any moment, any second”.
“For every person who heard my voice and my daughter’s pleading voice, yet did not rescue her, I will question them before God on the Day of Judgement,” she was quoted as saying by the BBC. “Netanyahu, Biden, and all those who collaborated against us, against Gaza and its people, I pray against them from the depths of my heart.”
Wissam still holds the little pink bag she kept for her. The bag has a notebook where Hind had been practising handwriting.
“How many more mothers are you waiting to feel this pain? How many more children do you want to get killed?” she asked.
“Hind and everyone else in the car is martyred,” her grandfather, Baha Hamada, told AFP. “Members of the family were able to reach the area because Israeli forces withdrew early at dawn (on Saturday).”
Audio recordings of calls between Hind and emergency call operators indicate that she alone was left alive in the car, trying to escape Israeli forces even as her relatives lost their lives around her.
Her shouts for help ended when the phone was cut off amid the sound of more gunfire.
The BBC report added that recordings of Hind’s conversations with call operators, which the Red Crescent made public, triggered a campaign to arrive at the truth.
A black Kia car Hind had been travelling in was found, its windscreen and dashboard in smithereens and bullet holes dotted the sides.
One paramedic told journalists that Hind was among the six bodies found inside the Kia car.
The report said another vehicle, a few metres away, was found. It was burned out, and its engine had come out. The Red Crescent says the vehicle is the ambulance sent to rescue Hind. Its crew Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun were reportedly killed.
According to the rules of war, medical personnel must not be targeted in a conflict, and injured people must get complete medical care without delay.
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