Gaza father’s cry of grief: ’Wake up baby’ | Middle East Eye
Mohammed Omer | Tuesday 13 October 2015 |Last update: Thursday 15 October 2015
(...) What a night
“We were woken up in the night by the house shaking as a first missile hit nearby. My wife Noor shouted out, ’What is happening!’ as I got up from the bed."
Yahya told his wife he would go and see what was happening, and then everything - water tank, the walls, and roof started falling on top of them.
“I could hear my daughter Rahaf screaming “Papa come, take me out, stones are on my head!” he recalls, in tears.
Rahaf’s voice was silenced by the next Israeli missile and he stumbled round to see his pregnant wife bleeding on the floor.
Yahya says he felt powerless, unable to reach his daughter whose voice was still calling out for him. He still feels powerless as his two-year-old son lies injured and having recently woken from a brief coma.
An ambulance crew member said he arrived at the scene, not sure where to look. The father was then unconscious at that point, unable to tell him how many people were in the house to look for.
Local boys try to retrieve family possessions following the Israeli airstrike on the home of Yahya and Noor Hassan on Sunday (MEE/Mohammad Asad)
8am at hospital
In the morning at the hospital, Yahya Hassan asked his relatives about his wife and his daughter. In an attempt to save him pain, they lied and said his wife and children were still alive on a ward.
But Yahya insisted they take him in a wheelchair to see them at Shifa hospital.
“The doors of the morgue opened and there were my wife and daughter - dead - they were dead,” he screams out in tears.
AN uncle kisses the head of Rahaf Hassan in the morgue in Gaza, following her death in an Israeli airstrike on Sunday (MEE/Mohammad Asad)
“Wake up baba, wake up, wake up,” the father calls to his daughter in the cold morgue.
Yahya Hassan lived in a rural area among farmers in Zaytoun, east Gaza City. Everyone says this area was no threat to Israel as farmers rise early and go to bed early after a working day.
Israel’s official response was that missiles were targeting “two Hamas weapon manufacturing facilities”.
Hussam Hassan, a cousin of Yahya, responded to Israel’s allegations by stating that they were never a security threat to Israel, just a community of poor farmers growing vegetables for the local market.
“Are those toys weapons against Israel?” asks Hussam while holding some children in torn clothes carrying old torn toys.
Yahya asks: “Why does Israel kill our wives and daughters? What sin have they committed?” as he recalls the final moments before they went to bed, when Rahaf was asking her dad to play games, before going to sleep.
Unable to move, due to deep shrapnel wounds in his legs - he knows there is nothing left for him, of Rahaf, except memories and a doll, among the ruins of stones.
“Israel destroyed my life… in a blink of an eye, they took my wife, my daughter, unborn child, my home, and my son traumatised forever,” says the crying father to MEE.
A crater left by the Israeli airstrike in Gaza on Sunday that killed a toddler and mother (MEE/Mohammad Asad)
Yahya Hassan does not know what the future holds, but all those offering condolences know that he will have to join the ranks of thousands more homeless families, waiting for simple construction materials to reach Gaza to rebuild after Israel’s routine military attacks.
For those on the scene on Monday it was heart-breaking to see the young father begging to hold his dead three-year-old daughter one last time, just for a few more seconds.
Yahya Hassan is left unable to explain to his two-year-old son why his mum is gone. He saw her cold body and unresponsive face, and no-one can explain why he can’t play with sister Rahaf anymore.
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