Baraa, Lamis and Dana They have circles under their eyes and between the three of them they are not even 30 years old. The older brother, 13 years old, sits between the little girls of eight and six years old on the sofa in the house of his family friends who welcomed them as soon as they landed in Barcelona. “Today we were finally able to sleep,” the young man tells EL PERIÓDICO with a faint smile on his visibly tired face. “They still have nightmares“says a family friend in a low voice. The three landed on Thursday with their mother, Abir, in El Prat after 45 days trapped in Gaza.
Abir doesn’t want to be in the photos, he is very slim and she doesn’t look like the same woman smiling who appears portrayed in a series of images taken just a few months ago that her friend shows, justifying her evasion. She doesn’t want to speak either, rather, she can’t, because the pain she feels prevents her from speaking. verbalize what happened, and asks his son Baraa let him tell it for her. Her husband has decided to stay in Zeitunthe town in which they resided in the northern Gaza with their families before returning to Barcelona, to take care of their grandparents. “No one else could do it,” Baraa explains.
Eight years ago, they moved to the Catalan capital so that their father, who was seriously injured in a previous offensive, he could receive medical treatment in Spain. “Every so often they have to operate on him. His face is burned,” explains his eldest son. Until then, they were normal children, they went to school in the La Sagrera neighborhood, and they had the same dreams and aspirations as any child in Barcelona. “Now I can only think that my family who has stayed there is well,” says the young man. This summer they traveled to Gaza to visit family and learn Arabic. In mid-September they decided to extend the trip a little longer and were surprised by the war.
“It changed our faces, we were very afraidWe didn’t know when we were going to die“, says the young man while his sisters nod. “Some of my friends with whom I studied Arabic in the summer have died. There are entire families that have disappeared under the bombs and the school where he studied no longer exists, they have destroyed everything,” says the boy while his sisters look at the ground.
Broken dreams
“Palestinian children do not expect anything from tomorrow because we know that at any moment we can die. We only think about what we will do today. My friends had dreams that we told each other. That if we are going to travel here, that if I will build a house there, and now they are dead“, ditch.
Life, during the war, was the same every day. “During the last weeks they gave us in the morning three dates, a piece of bread and a bottle of non-drinking water to which we added lemon because it had bugs. It had to last us all day,” says Baraa. At first, they gathered bags of rice to prepare for war, but with the water cuts that rice was of no use. “We went to bed with hunger every day. “We couldn’t sleep,” says the little girl, Dana. The water was brought by Baraa and her cousins every three days. They went with empty oil jugs to a mosque that had a well. They stood in lines for two hours and made several trips. The hours they did not spend locked up sheltering from the bombs, they read the Koran and asked God to end the war.
Journey to leave
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“No one was calm, this war has been the strongest that our relatives remembered,” he says. “We can’t stop thinking about our family. We can’t talk to them. There is no telephone or internet,” he says worriedly. “There was also no medicines“recalls the youngest. The middle sister attends the interview with a lost look while she wipes away a tear that escapes down her cheek.
“From the first day we were clear that we would not be able to leave. With the help of the Spanish embassy we managed it, but the Israeli Army gave us a lot of trouble,” he says. They left with what they were wearing, in a backpack they carried the passports and they walked for almost 10 hours to reach the southern border. It was raining, they were soaked and had no spare clothes, but they were able to take shelter at a family friend’s house. The next day they arrived at the border point where they were held for more than 11 hours while the Israeli Army authorized their departure. Although the children do have a Spanish passport, the mother only has the DNI. Finally they succeeded and since then “the Spanish embassy did not leave us alone,” she explains.