Gaza Herald – The hardest part for Saeda Al-Zaaneen’s children was not watching their mother being killed before their eyes; it was spending six full days calling out to her while she lay inside a food freezer.
Every time one of them knocked on the freezer door or whispered, “Mama,” only silence answered.
This was not a scene from a film or a novel. It was the reality of a Palestinian family trapped by the Israeli occupation forces in Gaza City, where burying their mother became impossible. With no other option, the family turned a commercial ice cream freezer into a makeshift morgue to preserve her body until Israeli occupation forces withdrew.
Inside the same home where Saeda was killed, her eldest daughter, Haneen (20), now sits beside her grandmother, scrolling through videos she has kept from that day 27 months ago. In them, her mother’s body lies on the floor as her husband and children surround her, taking turns kissing her hands, forehead, and hair.
A Mother Killed Before Her Children
Unable to recount the story herself, Haneen simply says, “I can’t .. I just can’t bear it.”
Her grandmother, Umm Ali, tells the story instead.
She says it began on March 18, 2024, when Israeli tanks unexpectedly advanced toward Al-Shifa Medical Complex, leaving the Abdel Hadi family trapped inside their home near Haidar Abdel Shafi Roundabout in western Gaza City.
Nearly 40 family members crowded into a single ground-floor apartment as occupation tanks, snipers, and quadcopter drones surrounded the area, turning it into a ghost zone, completely cut off from the outside world.
That morning, Saeda began baking bread unusually early.
“When I asked why she was rushing,” Umm Ali recalled, “she told me she wanted to finish cooking before circumstances made it impossible to light a fire again.”
After preparing the dough, Saeda sat down to breastfeed her youngest son, Ahmed, who was only four months old.
“That was the last time she ever held him in her arms,” her mother-in-law said.
When she finished nursing him, Saeda walked toward the balcony beside the kitchen to hang laundry.
“She had barely taken a few steps when I called out to warn her,” Umm Ali said. “She never turned around.”
Before she could finish speaking, a bullet pierced Saeda’s chest.
A second shot followed moments later.
She collapsed to the ground.
A Desperate Attempt to Save Her
The family rushed toward the balcony door, but no one dared reach her.
“Israeli drones and snipers were everywhere,” Umm Ali said.
Believing she had injured only her legs when she fell, her husband threw her a rope.
Saeda slowly crawled toward them until they managed to pull her inside.
He carried her into the living room.
Only then did they realize one bullet had entered and exited through her chest, while another had exploded near her heart.
Her husband ran from window to window, screaming for an ambulance.
None came.
The neighborhood remained completely sealed off.
Leaving the home meant certain death.
About thirty minutes after she was shot, their neighbor, Mahmoud Al-Hindi, a nurse, jumped from the neighboring house despite the danger.
After checking her pulse and eyes, he turned to her husband.
“May God grant you patience. She has passed away.”
Umm Ali remembers the cries that filled the house.
“All nine of her children, five girls and four boys, began screaming together, calling out, ‘Get up, Mama.’”
As the children mourned their mother, baby Ahmed cried uncontrollably from hunger.
“He didn’t stop crying for a single minute,” Umm Ali said, “until his aunt, who had given birth only days before the siege, breastfed him.”
Only then did he calm down.
Six Days Inside a Freezer
The family’s grief quickly gave way to another impossible question.
“What do we do with her body?”
“There was no way to bury her,” Umm Ali explained.
Her husband gathered digging tools, hoping to bury her nearby, but Israeli snipers prevented anyone from stepping outside.
After hours of discussion, the family reached an unimaginable decision.
Using electricity generated by solar panels, they emptied a large freezer used for storing frozen food so her body would not decompose in front of the children.
“We removed everything inside, took out the shelves, wrapped her body in a blanket, tilted the freezer so we could place her inside, sealed it tightly, then stood it upright again.”
She pauses before adding softly: “It was madness .. but we had no other choice.”
Everything happened in full view of the children.
They could not understand what they were witnessing, nor could anyone explain it in a way they could comprehend.
As Umm Ali tells the story, Haneen sits beside her silently, wiping away tears.
“My younger brothers and sisters spent hours standing in front of that freezer,” she says.
“They talked to our mother, asked her questions, knocked on the freezer door.”
She pauses before asking quietly:
“Can anyone imagine their mother dying and remaining inside a freezer in the same room for six days?”
“My brother Shafiq would stand there for long periods calling, ‘Mom’ .. and Ahmed cried constantly.”
One Last Goodbye
Throughout those six days, Umm Ali says she could not silence the voice of her daughter-in-law calling to her children.
“I kept secretly opening the freezer door just to reassure myself that Saeda had really passed away.”
Outside, shelling, explosions, drones, and tanks continued to surround the neighborhood.
Yet all of that seemed secondary compared to the presence of Saeda’s body inside the home.
The family continued fasting, breaking it only with a sip of water before dawn.
Then, after six full days, in the middle of the night, they heard someone shouting from the street:
“The Israeli occupation forces have withdrawn from the area”
“At first we didn’t believe it,” Umm Ali said.
“My son carefully climbed upstairs and confirmed that the occupation vehicles were gone and people had begun leaving their homes.”
Haneen interrupts.
“That’s when we finally broke down crying, the tears we had held back throughout the siege. It felt as though she had just killed.”
Her father opened the freezer and placed Saeda’s body before her children.
“Her body was frozen solid,” Haneen recalled.
“My father told us these were our final moments with her and asked us to say goodbye one last time.”
He then carried her body to Al-Faluja Cemetery in Jabalia, in northern Gaza, where she was finally laid to rest.
