THE story should not be real. It was the morning of January 29, 2004. The Israeli military had already bombed substantial parts of the affluent Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood in Gaza City, including — in October 2023 — the totality of the Gaza City campus of the Islamic University of Gaza.
Following a warning from the Israeli military, seven members of a family got into a Kia Picanto to flee southward. But the Israeli bombing had levelled a nearby high-rise, so the car had to go north before it could go south.
Not far down the road, the car came under fire from Israeli military vehicles, including Merkava tanks. According to a remarkable investigation by Britain-based research agency Forensic Architecture, 355 bullets were fired into the car.
One of those in the car, a six-year-old child named Hind Rajab, called emergency workers. “They are dead,” she says of her family members. “The tank is next to me. It’s almost night. I am scared. Come get me, please.” The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) sent an ambulance to rescue her.
Two weeks later, on February 10, Hind Rajab’s dead body was found near the bodies of her family, along with those of the paramedics (Ahmed al-Madhoun and Yusuf al-Zeino) sent to save her.
“The tank is next to me,” says the young girl on a tape saved by the PRCS, but both the US State Department and the Israeli military say that no tanks operated in the area at that time. It is the word of a murdered child against the world’s most dangerous and disingenuous governments.
The murder of Hind Rajab and her family shocked the world (Hind Rajab’s father was killed in a separate attack in late June). When the students at Columbia University occupied their administration building, they named it Hind Rajab Hall; the singer Macklemore released a song in May called “Hind’s Hall.”