IN the early hours of Saturday morning, 24-year-old Sajida al-Kafarna was sleeping with her family inside a school classroom when they were woken by a huge explosion.
“We reassured each other that we were OK, but when I noticed my father’s empty place, panic set in because he had gone to pray dawn prayer,” recounted Sajida.
Sajida’s family was among the roughly 2,400 displaced Palestinians sheltering at al-Tabin School. Her father, Abdul Aziz al-Kafarna, 58, was inside the school’s small mosque when Israel bombed the building.
Sajida paused, holding back sobs.
“My mother, my siblings, and I all rushed to find him. The school was ablaze, and everyone was screaming hysterically,” she recalled, speaking to Al Jazeera over the phone from the Daraj district in central Gaza City.
Sajida described harrowing scenes as she frantically searched for her father among the dead.
“One person was still on fire, calling for help, but no one could save him. He burned in front of us, and no one could get in to help,” Sajida recalled in a trembling voice.
“We tried to douse the flames, then we used our mobile flashlights to search for my father because it was still dark.”
She remembers scrambling over torn limbs trying to find her father, her clothes and hands getting covered in blood. Sajida, her five siblings and their mother spent nearly two hours searching for Abdul. Then, “My mother broke down, screaming at us to stop. ‘Enough. Let’s go back. Your father was torn to pieces,’” she recounted.
The family returned to their classroom in a state of collapse. But Sajida couldn’t rest without finding some trace of her father. So she sneaked out again with one brother to continue their search. “Civil defence crews tried to stop us, but we insisted,” Sajida said.
Soon afterwards, she found Abdul’s body in the corner of the mosque, buried under the remains of other victims. “Thank God, my father’s body was one of the few that wasn’t completely dismembered,” she shared, bursting into tears.
She watched as people around her gathered people’s remains to bury – unsure of whether they belonged to their loved ones. “It was unbearable,” Sajida said.
