After more than a year of Israeli bombing in Gaza, there were few blessings for Talal and Samar Al-Najjar to count when a fire was agreed. Their house was in ruins, they and their children were displaced and were giving hunger.
Yet they were lucky: their seven family was intact, something to feel grateful to the war between Israel and Hamas, who killed tens of thousands. Many others are likely to be discovered by the rubble.
So, with only hours until the 15 -month nightmare of the Palestinian enclave was paused, it hit the disaster.
Their 20-year-old son, Amr Al-Najjar, had rushed to their village in the south of Gaza, hoping to be the first at home. Instead, it became one of the latest lives claimed before the start of the fragile truce.
“We were waiting so much time to celebrate the ceasefire, but our time of joy turned into a pain,” said Al-Najjar, 49, into an interview after an interview after funeral for her son.
Not long after 8:30 on January 19, when he thought-the ceased the fire had begun, Amr Al-Najjar was killed together with two cousins in what the survivors said was an Israeli strike. The Israeli army denied having attacked the area.
Their funeral was a humble deal. A group of relatives sat in a circle of plastic chairs to pray outside a dusty and temptular field of tar tents and wooden barracks on the outskirts of the southern city of Khan Youunis. This is where the Al-Najjars, like hundreds of other families, had sought refuge from the Israeli bombing in his campaign against Hamas.
During the war, which began in October 2023 after Hamas led an attack on Israel who, the Israelis say, killed about 1,200 people, over 47,000 Palestinians were killed, according to the health authorities of Gazan. Do not distinguish between civilians and fighters.
The night before the ceasefire, the al-najars had brought the suitcases in their improvised tent. Mrs. Al-Najjar, 44, was anxious to return to Khuzaa, their green agricultural village along the southern border of Gaza. He wanted to see what remained of their home, he said, and he imagined herself greeting friends, relatives and neighbors with a joyful embrace.
But as they were waiting for the dawn, Mrs. Al-Najjar could not repress growing discomfort. His son, Omar, who had left in the early hours of the morning, had left his bag behind. “He said to me: I have the feeling that I will not come back,” he remembered, then raid in sobs.
The family knew that returning to his house quickly, less than a mile away from the border with Israel, to whom the Israeli troops and troops would have withdrawn, could be risky.
But for many Gaza, all too familiar with the periodic wars and the fires that end them in the end, the first provisional hours of a respite are fundamental: many run home to protect everything that was spared in war by looters that yes They launch to tear anything to be sold by the ruins: everything from armor to kitchen utensils.
Amr Al-Najjar Ahmad, who survived the attack, said that the couple waited early on Sunday the ceased had to have an effect, together with two of their cousins, on the outskirts of Khuzaa, ready to enter 8: 30, the programmed beginning of the truce.
“They hoped to save everything they could, like pieces of wood or any object,” said their father. The family could use the materials to build a refuge in their destroyed houses until groups of aid could provide them curtains.
For Gazens, Al-Najjar said, the end of the fighting was not the end of their concerns: “It is another fight-a fighting internal battle to survive and reconstruct everything we can”.
While the two al-najjar brothers left, a cousin filmed Amr smiling on a motorcycle, wearing a red shirt, a brown jacket and jeans.
“You will be the first people there!” He shouted the cousin, laughing.
“And I’m going to return a martyr,” he replied with a smile.
For his parents, he was a unnerving premonition.
Not long after his children left, Al-Najjar saw the news that the truce had been delayed until 11:15 in panic, he and his wife repeatedly tried to call and send messages to their children and grandchildren. But the young people were in an area without receipt-they had no way of knowing the postponement of the ceasefire.
From the outskirts of Khuzaa, said the older brother of Amr Al-Najjar, Ahmad, listened and expected while the fights continued until 8:20 and then shed. Shortly after 8:30, they entered the city, encouraged by the arrival of the others doing the same.
Ahmad Al-Najjar moved away from the group after embarking on a gas cylinder, from which he hoped to recover some fuel.
“Suddenly, I heard a missile Whooshing sound,” he said. He dived behind a pile of rubble while an explosion shook the land around him. “When I looked up, I saw the smoke rising from the place where they were standing,” he said. “I couldn’t see them – just smoke.”
Al-Najjar fled from the village in a tank, a drone and a sniper fire, said, shocked and confused until he subsequently learned that the truce had been delayed.
The Army of Israel said that “was not aware of a strike” to the coordinates that the Najjar family provided to the Times.
The Gaza emergency rescue services say that 10 Gazas lost their lives between the time when the ceased the fire had to have effect and when it actually did it. The residents of Khuzaa say that the number killed in the village alone was 14.
None of Najjar’s cousins who had been killed, who had aged between 16 and 20 years of age, had ties with militant groups, said their parents.
Not long after the strike, Amr Al-Najjar’s relatives began to look for men disappeared. While one of them filmed himself through torn roads and rubble in Khuzaa, he stumbled on the lifeless body of a young man in a red shirt, brown jacket and jeans.
“Oh God, have mercy on you, Amr”, can be heard moaning while filming the body. “God’s mercy on you.”
Mrs. Al-Najjar described her son as the type of person who loved to tease and joke, and who as an adult man still implored her to make sweets.
More than a week after the ceasefire, his father is still fighting to find a comfort when he had wished for this way. Hope is a feeling from the days when he imagined that the end of the fighting would bring him the opportunity to see his son build a future.
“Everything I wanted was to see him make his dreams come true,” said Al-Najjar. “Now, my son is gone and our dreams have gone with him.”