On Dec. 4, Abu Khalil Habeib was at home with much of his extended family when Israeli troops invaded the neighborhood under cover of heavy artillery shelling. Among more than 90 relatives sheltering with him were the family of his brother, Hamdan, who had been displaced from the Al-Sha’af neighborhood.
“We all evacuated from the house, but after a few meters, Hamdan stopped and said to me, ‘I need to go back to get milk for my daughter because there’s none in the markets,’” Habeib recounted. Tragically, this decision was fatal: “He went back home, and we haven’t seen him since.” Amid the chaos of the army’s invasion into Shuja’iya, the rest of the family continued on their journey. “We carried on walking until we reached the shelters in Al-Rimal [another neighborhood nearby]. We waited for hours, but [Hamdan] didn’t come,” Habeib continued. “We tried to contact him, but there was no phone service. By then, we anticipated that something bad had happened to him.”
The family lived with the painful void of Hamdan’s absence for two months, only to return home after the withdrawal of the army and make a heart-wrenching discovery. “We found Hamdan’s body in the middle of the street, appearing as if something had crushed it,” Habeib recalled, tears welling in his eyes. “An Israeli tank had run over his body, pulling his bones apart from his flesh.”