Sham Abu Tabaq, age 5, has a piercing stare. Behind her dark eyes are memories she has hardly begun to process.
She has experienced war. She has been forced from her home. And she was in her father’s arms when he was fatally shot, and saw both him and her older sister left for dead in the street.
And then, there’s this: Sanaa doesn’t just blame the Israeli military for killing her husband and daughter and shooting her in the leg – though certainly she does blame the Israeli military.
An Israeli soldier may also have saved her life.
That should not be extraordinary. All militaries are obligated under international law to help injured civilians. But in the war in Gaza, stories like Sanaa’s are exceedingly rare.
“He had mercy towards us,” she said of the soldier. But he and his comrades, she said, “also took from me the most precious thing I had.”
Sanaa and her husband Akram – a schoolteacher – lived with their daughters Sham and Yasmeen in Beit Lahia, in the northernmost end of Gaza.
She worked at a foundation that provides support for orphans. Like many women in Gaza, she dressed conservatively and often covered her face, which is marked by deep burn scars from a childhood accident.
In the days after Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel, and Israel’s ensuing military campaign, the family were forced from their home – fleeing Israel’s unprecedented bombardment of the Gaza Strip. When a brief ceasefire was announced in late November as part of a hostage release deal, they saw an opportunity to return.
“We were so happy we weren’t even able to sleep,” Sanaa recalled. “A truce was happening, and we were going to go home.”
They departed the United Nations-run health clinic where they had been living, in the Jabalya refugee camp, and began the roughly three-mile journey on foot. They were almost home, she said, when shots rang out.
“It was like there was a sniper and he was shooting at us. We didn’t see him,” she said. “Suddenly we were all injured.”
‘They finished him off’
Seven-year-old Yasmeen’s condition was the most serious. She was shot in the back and shoulder. Akram was struck in the stomach, and Sanaa in the leg. Only Sham was left unscathed by the hail of bullets.
“My husband was telling me, ‘Let’s crawl and maybe we can find an ambulance to take us, or somebody might see us and help us.’ But I couldn’t crawl. And Yasmeen was in a very terrible condition – two bullets, and she was all covered in blood. So, I told him, ‘We can’t.’ He said, “I’ll try to crawl.’ So he crawled a little bit. They finished him off! He remained in his place. He was killed,” Sanaa said.
For several hours they lay there in the middle of the street – too injured and fearful to move. Sanaa held Yasmeen, promising her daughter that an ambulance was on the way and that they would survive. But no help was on the way. False hope was all Sanaa could offer her daughter in that moment.
Life drained out of Yasmeen, and she succumbed to her wounds.
“I laid my daughter Yasmeen on the ground, may God bless her soul. And I covered her with a blouse. And I told Sham, ‘Come on darling, let’s crawl.’”
Crawling along the ground, speaking in whispers, they left behind the bodies of their family and made it inside a partially bombed two-story house. They huddled in a bathroom as night fell.
“In the morning, around 7:30, we heard the sounds of the Israelis and of the tanks,” Sanaa said. “I told her, ‘Sham my darling, the Israelis have come. They are going to shoot us. But don’t be afraid. It’s over. And we are going to die.’ She said, ‘Okay mom, but hide me. I don’t want to see them when they come and shoot me.’”
As Sanaa cradled her daughter, an explosion shook the house, blowing in the door of the bathroom where they were huddled and shattering the window above them, sending glass raining down.
Soon, the soldiers were inside the house. After some tense moments of shouting, she said, the soldiers were convinced that Sanaa and Sham were not harboring militants and tended to their wounds.
Sanaa soon began pleading with an Arabic-speaking soldier, who denied that his forces had killed Sanaa’s husband and eldest daughter, and instead blamed Hamas and its leader, Yahya Sinwar, for their deaths.
“I told him, ‘Please hand me over to an ambulance to Gaza (City). Can you at least take me to my family, so they take my daughter? I am not important. I know I’m going to die. I just want my family to take my daughter.’”
“He told me, ‘No, we cannot hand you over to Gaza. Wait a little bit. I might be able to help you,’” Sanaa said.
Sanaa says the Israeli soldiers concluded they could not treat her in the field. Her condition was critical, she says, and she needed to be treated in a hospital. After making several calls, she recalled, the Arabic-speaking soldier said they would take them to a hospital in Israel. They carried her out of the house on a stretcher with Sham.
As she was being loaded onto a Humvee, Sanaa says she saw her daughter Yasmeen’s body in the street.
“I told him: ‘This is Yasmeen. Please bring her to me.’ He said no. I told him, ‘Then, please bury her for me,’” Sanaa recalled. “They kept going with the stretcher.”
An hour’s drive later, Sanaa says, they arrived at what appeared to be a mostly empty military staging ground. Standing in an open area, soldiers doing a security check ordered Sanaa to remove her jilbab – a full-body covering garment – in front of female soldiers, while male soldiers said they would look away. All the while, she continued to bleed from the bullet wound to her leg.
“Then they made me lift off my blouse and my undergarment items,” she recalled. “Sham – they took off all her clothes as well.”
“If it was not for Sham, I wouldn’t have agreed to take off my clothes. Because I was scared that if I didn’t take off my clothes, they would shoot Sham. Or they would shoot me in front of Sham, and I would never know what happened to her. If I had been alone I would have rather they shoot me, and I wouldn’t have taken off my clothes.”
‘This is God who stood by my side’
For eight months, she has had a slow recovery, with physical therapy. She and Sham have lived in a single, shared hospital room. She has no idea what happened to the bodies of her daughter and husband.
It is a vexing limbo – aware of the privilege of their safety yet pining for a home and life that has been irrevocably changed.
And she is terrified at being sent back into the warzone that was her home. Indeed, Israeli authorities are now planning on returning the pair to Gaza next month unless another government takes them in, according to hospital officials, Israeli officials and human rights organizations.
The Israeli military denies its soldiers shot Sanaa and her family.
Sanaa called that claim a lie. The IDF claimed that the militants fired grenades on their position – Sanaa said she did not hear any explosions.
“If we had heard the voice of Israelis, we would have fled and returned (to the shelter). If we had heard the voice of resistance, we would have fled and returned,” Sanaa said.
“It’s true he helped me,” Sanaa says of the Arab-speaking soldier who helped facilitate the decision to take her out of Gaza, to Israel.
But she cannot bring herself to thank him. And she says she would not, if she saw him again.
“This was a miracle from God that the soldier who was speaking to me in Arabic was helping me,” she said.
“This is God who stood by my side, and He put mercy in them towards me. It is from God,” she said. “Not by (the soldier’s) own will.”