When the Israeli genocide in Gaza began more than a year ago, the three elderly al-Ghalayini sisters — Maysoun, 80, Rofida, 65, and Arwa, 61, decided they would not leave their house in al-Rimal neighborhood in Gaza City.
In January, Israeli soldiers surrounded their home and ordered them to move to southern Gaza.
When they did not comply, the soldiers threw a firebomb, according to their brother Abdulrahman al-Ghalayini, who is in Egypt and spoke to The Electronic Intifada online.
The flames began sweeping through a room in which the sisters were sitting until Arwa succeeded in putting it out, Abdulrahman said.
Although the sisters survived the ordeal, they lost their two closest neighbors, Daya Abdulshafi, 79, and her daughter Rasha, 52, who were killed during the Israeli siege.
The sisters ran out of luck this past July, however, when Israeli forces reinvaded western Gaza City.
On 10 July soldiers forced their way into the sisters’ home.
“They bulldozed a wall, then shot Arwa in the head as she tried to open the door, then they turned their guns on Maysoun, killing her, and leaving me wounded alone beside my sisters’ bodies,” Rofida told Joud Akila, a neighbor, in shaky voice on 10 July.
Rofida stayed on the line with Joud throughout the ordeal. But after about 40 minutes, she saw smoke coming from another room, Joud told The Electronic Intifada. The soldiers had intentionally set part of the house on fire, Rofida told Joud in growing panic.
Soon, all the sisters’ phones went dead.
Abulrahman said it is impossible to imagine how terrifying it must have been for Rofida as she looked at her two dead sisters unable to do anything.
He is sure, he said, that grief killed her before the smoke and the fire.
https://electronicintifada.net/content/three-phones-go-silent/49541
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