Girl miraculously escapes blast that kills entire family

While 6-year-old Dalal Abu Eisha's family is dead, she survived, escaping Israeli shelling that killed her immediate relatives in western Gaza City.

In a turn of events which can hardly be described as fortunate, Dalal left home with her grandmother hours before an Israeli projectile slammed into her family's home.

She was accompanying her grandmother, who was visiting one of her daughters, who had just lost a child.

Ruba Abu Ras, Dalal's cousin, was just a toddler, killed by an Israeli missile while out with her mother who was shopping for the children. Sixty-five-year-old Turkiyya Abu Eisha, Dalal's grandmother, had wanted to offer her daughter a shoulder to cry on after the loss of little Ruba. They were to spend Monday night mourning at Dalal's aunt's home in the Zaytoum neighbourhood in the besieged strip.

Little did Dalal and her grandmother know the tragedy that would soon befall them.

The 6-year-old girl awoke on Tuesday to discover that her father Aamir, her mother Naheel, her brothers 9-year-old Mohammad, 12-year-old Sayyid, 5-year-old Ahmad and sister, 7-year-old Ghayda, had all been killed.

Three married brothers from the Abu Eisha family lived in the two-storey building.

Two of the brothers and their wives had taken refuge in a basement to protect their children from Israeli shelling.

But the third, Aamir, had more faith in the Israeli military, knowing that no weapons or fighters were in his home.

The father assumed his children would be safe sleeping in their rooms, seeing no reason to unnecessarily disrupt their lives.

Aamir did not live long enough to see just how misplaced his confidence was - his entire family, except Dalal, was wiped out as they prepared to go to bed.

Survivor's account

According to one of his surviving sisters-in-law, "At exactly midnight, we heard a terrible explosion and a wall collapsed on us. With fear and strong will, I removed the rubble and stood up, hugging my youngest child close."

"Then I removed some rubble off two of my (other) children. I turned on my cell phone to use its light and discovered that another wall had fallen over my five-year-old son, Amr, just before my husband realised he was dead," Sirin Abu Eisha said.

Soon after, her husband began searching for the rest of the family, and "we left the basement out of fear that the house might collapse over our heads. We realised that the staircase and the upper floor had already collapsed, however, and there was no sign of life there," she added.

"But my husband thought his brother Aamir had found refuge elsewhere else. We tried to call him on his cell phone, but there was no answer," she said.

"Two hours later, neighbours who had started removing rubble found parts of human bodies, and that was when we knew Aamir and his family were dead."

The writer is a freelance journalist in Gaza