Ahed Bseiso was injured by Israeli shelling on her family home in northern Gaza, leaving her stunned, disoriented, and numb to the overwhelming pain that would soon overwhelm her.
“I was only able to see white fog.” Reliving what happened on December 19, Ahed said to Al Jazeera, “For a moment, I thought I was dead.”
Following her daily routine since October 7, the 17-year-old university student and her older sister Mona ascended to the sixth story of their building at 10:30 am on that particular day. This was Israel’s most savage assault on Gaza to date.
To phone their father, who is stationed overseas, they traveled up there. Every day, despite being under siege, heavy artillery fire, and severely lacking in supplies, they made an effort to communicate with him to let him know they were still alive.
Many people in Gaza are forced to use eSIM cards linked to any regional telecom company, climb onto a roof, or find signal boosters due to frequent outages and jamming.
Ahed claimed that after an Israeli-Hamas truce ended in November, their residence was surrounded by army vehicles, so she did not give the abnormally huge Israeli tank outside the building much attention.
