Gaza Herald – Abdullah Al-Ghaf, a civilian from Khan Younis in southern Gaza, never imagined that the morning of December 28, 2023, would mark the beginning of a lifelong tragedy, one that his heart would never be able to bear.
From the early hours of that day, nothing felt ordinary. His two children, Mohammad and Firas, who usually went back to sleep after dawn prayers, stayed close to him instead, hugging him, kissing him, and smiling in a way he had never seen before. It was as if they were saying goodbye in their own way, just hours before their departure.
At around 7:00 a.m., two-year-old Firas, Abdullah’s youngest son, made his final request: “Dad, I want biscuits.”
Without hesitation, the father left the house to buy them from a nearby vendor. But while he was away, an explosion shook the area. At that moment, Abdullah says, he felt an overwhelming fear that something terrible had happened to his children.
“I rushed back home, my heart telling me something was wrong,” he recalls. “When I arrived, I heard the screams of neighbors. They told me my children and my wife had been killed.”
By then, his children had been taken to Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. Abdullah ran there, still clutching the pack of biscuits in his hand, determined to fulfill the promise he had made to his son.
But fate did not grant him even a moment.
Shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell had already taken the lives of his children and his wife in an instant, turning a simple morning into an unimaginable loss.
Inside the morgue, Abdullah found eight members of his family lying lifeless, their bodies covered in blood. Among them was his wife, Umm Mohammad, and his young son Firas, whose face had been shattered by the blast.
In a moment of unbearable grief, the father opened Firas’s shroud, determined to keep his promise. He placed a piece of biscuit into his son’s small, cold hand, then closed the shroud around him.
Breaking down in tears, Abdullah said: “I opened Firas’s shroud. He didn’t get to eat the biscuits while he was alive, so I wanted him to touch them after he was killed.”
As for Mohammad, his other son, who had been injured in the same attack, he struggled with pain for weeks in Gaza’s overwhelmed hospitals before being transferred to Egypt for treatment, only to later succumb to his wounds, joining the rest of his family.
This is how small stories end in Gaza.
This is how moments of joy turn into tragedy, and ordinary days become final mournings, where children’s dreams are left unfinished.
