A mother’s body in Gaza was cut in half by an Israeli strike, her 1-year-old daughter’s skull split open
Tareq S. Hajjaj reports in Mondoweiss on 30 June 2026 :
At 9:30 p.m. on Monday, June 29, families sheltering in tents in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis received four phone calls from individuals identifying themselves as officers in the Israeli army. They were ordered to evacuate the area within seven minutes. Others receiving similar calls were told they had 15 minutes to flee.
The warning left almost no time to gather the few possessions families had managed to preserve after months of displacement.
Among those who fled was Diana Abu Daraz, 23, carrying her one-year-old daughter, Siwar. Siwar had only been days away from celebrating her first birthday. This coming birthday would have marked her first year of life. Instead, her relatives said, she will spend that birthday buried with her mother. They were both killed trying to leave their tent.
“We were told to evacuate,” Diana’s older sister, Yasmeen, told Mondoweiss. “But less than a minute after the warning, the bombings began. My sister was trying to flee, but she couldn’t.”
According to eyewitnesses who spoke to Mondoweiss, Diana was holding her daughter and heading away from the area that had received the evacuation when the bombs fell. She was almost 400 meters away from the site, one eyewitness said, when shrapnel from the bomb that fell in the area struck her from behind as she ran. The shrapnel severed Diana’s body in two and opened a wide gash in her daughter’s head, her brain hanging outside of her skull.
“They tell us these are ‘safe zones,’” Yasmeen said. “But they didn’t even wait for us to leave before bombing them.”