A terrified Palestinian girl, trapped in a car with the bodies of her family members killed in airstrikes on Gaza, reached out to the Palestinian Red Crescent for rescue after Israeli forces opened fire on them. However, days after a rescue team was dispatched to the area, the girl and the rescue team have not been heard from.
The Palestinian Red Crescent published an audio recording of part of the three-hour phone conversation between Hind Rajab, only six years old, and the emergency response team who sent a unit to rescue her on Monday. The team was forced to wait until the fighting in the area subsided before they could extract her.
Despite the Red Crescent deciding that the situation was safe enough to send an ambulance four hours into the call, they soon lost contact with her, as well as with the two-person ambulance crew.
The first to speak with the Red Crescent was 15-year-old Layan Hamada, a relative of Hind, who was trapped with her in the same car near a gas station in Gaza City as Israeli tanks and soldiers approached. Layan can be heard screaming in another audio recording released by the Red Crescent, “They are shooting at us!”
The Red Crescent reported that Layan and five other family members were killed. The Israeli army claimed they were unaware of the incident.
The only survivor, Hind, remained on the phone speaking with Rana Al-Fuqeh, a mental health specialist, for three hours as they tried to comfort her while preparing to send an ambulance. Palestinian rescue workers face impossible decisions in Gaza after almost four months of war, amid intense Israeli bombardments and severe restrictions on their movements, coupled with frequent communication outages.
