Eman’s Story: Injured in Gaza, Hoping to Heal

Eman didn’t marry because she dreamed of a white dress or a big celebration.

In Gaza, during the war, safety had become the biggest dream of all. She was only seventeen, searching for something to hold onto in a world that was collapsing around her every day. The fear, the sound of bombing, the displacement, the loss of any normal life: all of it made her feel that marriage might give her some sense of security.

“I just wanted someone to lean on in all that fear,” Eman says. “I was only looking for safety.”

She loved drawing and reading stories. She had memorized parts of the Quran and dreamed of becoming an Islamic studies teacher. But the war forced her to grow up far too fast.

Then she became pregnant. For Eman, it felt as if something beautiful might be born out of all the destruction. She held tightly to the idea of becoming a mother, as if the little girl growing inside her had given her one more reason to survive.

She chose a name early: Rital.

“I was always talking to her,” she says, “and imagining how I would hold her in my arms.”

But in war, even the smallest dreams are not safe.

One night, as she slept in her apartment, a shell broke through the window and struck her. She woke to pain, blood, and terror. She reached the hospital between life and death and underwent a long operation.

Eman lost more than her health. She lost Rital.

“The hardest thing wasn’t the injury,” she says, her voice heavy with exhaustion. “The hardest thing was losing my baby before I ever saw her.”

In the months that followed, she also lost the life she had been trying to build. She returned to her father’s house, carrying a grief too heavy for words.

Her health kept getting worse, and her wounds became a source of daily suffering. A long stretch of pain and treatment followed, until she was finally able to travel to Jordan for care.

Despite everything, Eman still talks about her studies.

“I want to heal,” she says, “and go back to my studies, and live my life normally again.”

Read about FAJR’s medical evacuations from Gaza and the MedEvac program, or see FAJR in Jordan.