‘I’ve lost my family, but for what?’: Man’s wife and two daughters killed in Iranian strike on Israel
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Cups of coffee are being carefully poured into small paper cups, each one served with a comforting embrace.
Close by, huddled under an arched courtyard, women of all ages are sitting, grieving in their own way.
Some are sobbing, others look dazed, others desperate.
Their intermittent wails of grief puncture the silence. Yet there’s a beautiful stillness about it all.
We’ve arrived just at the moment Tamra, Israel, has come to a standstill.
Everyone here is waiting for the bodies of four members of the Khatib family to return, killed when a ballistic missile from Iran hit their home on Saturday night.
Manar Khatib was killed alongside two of her daughters – 20-year-old Shada, and 13-year-old Hala – and her sister-in-law, also called Manar.
Layan Diab, the 23-year-old cousin of the girls
Layan Diab, 23, is a cousin of the girls. She’s in disbelief.
“It’s a deep loss. It hurts my soul. We lost our entire family. Four people here. I can’t fathom it. I don’t understand. It’s unbelievable,” she says. And she’s fearful of the coming days.
“Every time we hear the sirens, people start to scream and remember,” she says.
Just down the street is the girls’ grieving father, Raja Khatib.
Raja Khatib lost four family members, including his wife and two of his daughters, in the Iranian attack
A lawyer with a charming warmth, he starts to speak Italian, assuming we may be from Italy.
He’d just returned from a holiday there with his wife and children in Ferrara.
His eyes fill with tears as he says that if only he’d stayed a day longer, they would all be alive today.
‘I feel terrible. I feel fire in my body… I hope that I will survive this moment. I’ve lost my family, but for what? A missile from Iran?”
Debris, including shoes, was thrown across the street by the impact of the missile
I ask if he sees an end to this conflict between Iran and Israel. He seems despairing.
“Conflict with Iran, Lebanon, Gaza. We have a government who want[s] war. We want peace. We want to live.”
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Listening in supportively from the side is his middle daughter, 17-year-old Razan, who miraculously survived the blast.
That evening, she’d been out to buy cookies with her sisters.
When they returned, Razan and her older sister Shada played music and watched videos on their phones.
The Khatib family home was wrecked in the attack
When the alarms started to sound, they dismissed them at first.
But after a loud boom, Razan was unsettled and started to make her way to one of the safe rooms, imploring Shada to do the same.
But only Razan went.
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‘Iran is not winning this war’
“In one moment, everything went dark. I couldn’t see anything. I asked Allah, please don’t take my life,” she describes with searing clarity.
She could hear her father calling out for them all. But his cries were met with silence.
Razan’s family home is now a mound of rubble.
When we arrive there, we find neighbours and friends clearing the rubble. Many are deeply traumatised.
Hamad, who’s sweeping debris outside the house opposite, tells me he saw body parts flung across the road and into a nearby garden, and there’s blood on the walls.
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It is a deeply visceral and harrowing account of an attack that took everyone by surprise.
This is a residential neighbourhood. It’s thought the missile was bound for Haifa, more than an hour away and home to oil refineries.
But this time, with this missile, it fell on civilians. And took with it, futures.
