Transferring Her Body, He Did Not Know It Was His Mother… The Story of a Palestinian Paramedic in Gaza

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He did not know that the body he was transporting was that of his mother. All he knew was that someone had been killed by an Israeli missile, and he was doing his job as he did every day since the war began.

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Abdulaziz Bardini was performing his daily duties as a paramedic. As required by the circumstances due to the war that has been raging for over a year between Israel and Hamas, he and his colleagues went to the site of the airstrike.

A Tale of Pain

That day, an Israeli airstrike targeted a car in the Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, resulting in the deaths of three people. Abdulaziz arrived at the scene of the strike, and his task was to transport the body of a woman.

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The corpse was covered in blood, and its features were disfigured due to the injuries sustained. As he covered it with a piece of white cloth, it seemed like a routine matter in the context of the war.

Indeed, Abdulaziz transported the body to the nearby “Shuhada Al-Aqsa” hospital located in Deir al-Balah.

Upon arrival, somehow, he lifted the cloth from the victim’s face, as if an inner voice urged him to verify the features of the woman he had transported.

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“I did not recognize you”

Although the body was disfigured by its injuries, he noticed a resemblance in the features and realized that his mother was among the victims he was trying to treat.

This happened in less than ten minutes, a sufficient time frame to turn the life of that young paramedic upside down, who collapsed over his mother’s body, crying out, “I did not recognize you, mom.”

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Abdulaziz fell into a fit of tears while his colleagues tried to console him in his immense grief.

A new tragedy documented by the cameras present at the hospital on that difficult day for the paramedic, added to a long list of similar stories: tales of loss, weeping, and mourning, which have become daily life for the residents of the Gaza Strip.

Last Thursday, the Health Ministry of Hamas announced that the death toll from the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip had risen to at least 43,204.