On Sunday, the hospital waiting room was quiet: no crowds of relatives, no swarms of patients. Israeli air defenses had just repelled a massive Iranian attack, causing only one serious casualty.
But outside the pediatric intensive care unit at Soroka Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba, no one thinks the crisis has been averted. Instead, tension hung in the air until the door to the ward opened and a breathless mother stumbled out, her face contorted. Then, raw emotion quickly took over as she slumped in her chair and cried.
While Israel suffered no major losses overnight, the family was devastated. Amina al-Hasoni, 7, still struggling, was the only serious casualty of the Iranian fire. Her relatives say she might have survived if it weren’t for systemic inequality in Israel.
There are approximately 300,000 Arab Bedouins in the Negev Desert.About a quarter of them live in not recognized raised by Israeli officials. Without state recognition, these communities have long lacked planning and basic services such as running water, sewer and electricity. Despite repeated requests to the state, few have been able to enter the bomb shelters.
The Hasoni family lives in one such community, on top of a hill in the Negev village of al-Fur’ah, surrounded by a number of unrelated houses. When the rocket sirens went off on Saturday night, Amina’s uncle Ismail said he felt trapped – with nowhere to go.
A roar overhead indicated that air defense systems intercepted the missile before a large explosion occurred. Then he heard a woman screaming — his sister — and “I started running,” he said.
Ismail, 38, found his sister outside the house holding Amina, who was bleeding from the head. Her family decided to escape the rocket through the front door. But Amina failed and slept in a back room with pink walls painted with butterflies.
A missile fragment tore through the home’s thin metal roof, shearing a hole with a sharp metal edge. It hit right in front of the door – where Amina was knocked unconscious.
“I think she got hit while running away,” Ismail said.
He said he took the injured Amina from his sister and lifted her into his arms. Ismail then found a car that took her to the hospital, which was more than 40 minutes away on a bumpy, winding road that faded away in places and had camels running rampant in some places.
Only then, with Amina on the road, did he go into the house, where he said he saw a large piece of black shrapnel, about the size of a pretzel tin. “There’s blood,” he said, and a puddle turned into a stream that ran across the tile floor to the front door.
By Sunday afternoon, the orange-patterned tiles had been cleared. None of the dozen relatives there could say who did it, except that “it was bad for the children to see” all the blood. But Ismail wasn’t back inside yet.
“It’s hard,” he said, his jeans and boots still stained with blood. Not far from where he sat, a pink Minnie blanket and a black and white girl’s little dress hung on the clothesline at home.
“We can build shelters here,” Ismail added.
He rejected suggestions that Amina’s fate was due to bad luck.
“It’s part of the policy,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
The missile fragments that struck Amina’s home were among more than 150 missile fragments collected by police bomb squads in the area on Sunday. Amina’s family said police had collected the fragments that hit their home. The teams scoured the desert for hours, searching for debris and hauling away chunks of twisted metal — an effort that was repeated across Israel.
Hasoni’s home is not far from the Nevatim military base, which was reportedly targeted by Iranian attacks, Israeli officials said Suffered minor damage.
That was little comfort to Amina’s father, Mohammed, who spent the morning taking turns at her bedside at the hospital. He said he didn’t say much to her other than repeating her name.
Mohammed, 49, said Amina, the youngest of his 14 children, “loved to laugh all the time and have fun”. He added that she was a good student with a “strong character” but did not always follow instructions. And she likes to draw.
He called Iran’s actions “inhumane.”
“May God destroy them,” he said without hesitation.
