On 24 July, Ali Abu al-Fahm was about to go to sleep in his tent when quadcopter drones began randomly firing nearby. Soon, all he could hear were screams and bullets flying.
Ali is 58 and mostly paralyzed from the waist down. He told his wife Rania to “escape” and get out of the area of fire.
“Leave me,” Rania later recalled him saying. “I will be a burden on you if you push my wheelchair. Run away and stay alive.”
“I won’t leave you alone,” she told him.
Ali and Rania, along with their daughter Shams, 22, and son Zaman, 12, and their three younger children, fled the area, pulling Ali in his wheelchair through the sand of Qizan Abu Rashwan – a piece of land between Khan Younis and Rafah in southern Gaza that is now crowded with tents.
Around them they saw others in the camp fleeing in horror with their children. They smelled the suffocating pesticide-like scent of white phosphorus munitions that makes your lungs burn. ….more