Silhouetted by fire, six-year-old girl survives Israeli attack in Gaza

Al Jazeera

28-05-2025

Ward Khalil stares at the camera, her eyes barely focusing as she recalls the horrors of what she experienced.
'When I woke up, I found a huge fire, and I saw my mom was dead,' she says, recounting the Israeli air attack early on Monday that she survived but that killed her mother, two of her siblings and 33 other people.
Video footage of six-year-old Ward, her small body silhouetted against the flames after the attack on the Fahmi al-Jarjawi School in Gaza City, has shocked people around the world, highlighting the ferocity of Israel's attacks on Gaza.
Ward's father and a brother also survived the attack, but they both remain in hospital.
The school had been sheltering several families, including many children, when it was targeted by Israeli fire.
'I walked in the fire so I could escape. … I was in the fire, and the ceiling fell on me. The ceiling all collapsed. The fire was blazing,' Ward recounted, the distress clear in her voice. 'See? My arm is burned here,' she said, showing the camera the injuries.
Ward sobbed as she explained what happened to her family: 'They were martyred. May God forgive them.'
Footage taken from the school after the attack shows blood-stained walls and charred mattresses lying on the floor as rescue workers and distraught relatives search the rubble and burned clothing for signs of survivors.
Eyad al-Sheikh Khalil, Ward's uncle, rushed to the school after seeing a picture of her online.
'I was looking at the pictures journalists were posting, and I saw a photo of Ward with the Civil Defence and realised it was my niece,' he said of the images of Ward being comforted by rescue workers near the school, the bright bows in her hair dulled by the ash from the fire.
'When someone comes out of an attack like this, in a war like this, what do you expect a kid to feel?' Eyad asked. 'Of course she's going to suffer mentally. We're all suffering mentally.'
'It was indescribable,' a survivor who was pulled from the rubble with her son told rescuers. 'Body parts, charred bodies, the smell of burning. I swear to God, our hearts have died. We're shaken, exhausted. Enough.'
Displaced people in Gaza have been crowding into schools, many of which are affiliated with the United Nations, since the onset of Israel's war on the enclave in October 2023.
On May 7, Israeli forces targeted a single school sheltering 2,000 Palestinians twice on the same day, killing at least 29 civilians in the Bureij refugee camp, including women and children.
According to UNRWA, the UN aid agency for Palestinian refugees, nearly three-quarters of all school buildings in Gaza have been directly hit by Israeli fire since October 2023. According to UN satellite-based assessments, 95 per cent of Gaza's schools have sustained damage, rendering the vast majority unusable.
UN-run shelters are now 'overwhelmed with displaced people desperately seeking safety', UNRWA said in an update after the attack on the Fahmi al-Jarjawi School. It also stressed that the lack of food in Gaza due to a three-month siege imposed upon the territory by Israel had added to people's suffering.
'Many families are sheltering in abandoned, unfinished, or damaged buildings,' the agency explained. 'Sanitation conditions are dire; in some cases, hundreds of people are having to share a single toilet. Others, including children and pregnant women, are sleeping in the open.'