News / Palestine

Gazan ambulance worker finds himself carrying own mother’s body killed in Israeli raid

Thursday, 31 October 2024 10:21 AM [ Last Update: Thursday, 31 October 2024 10:21 AM ]

Palestinian medic Abed Bardini cries over the body of his mother in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on October 30, 2024. (Photo by AP)

A Palestinian ambulance worker has gone through a heart-wrenching experience after discovering that the body he was carrying on a stretcher following an Israeli airstrike on central Gaza was none other than his own mother.

Abed Bardini was in one of the two ambulances dispatched to the Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza, which was targeted by the Israeli occupation regime on Wednesday. Palestinian health officials said three people had been killed and at least ten wounded in the attack.

“Oh God, I swear- she’s my mother! I didn’t know it was her!” Bardini sobbed as he leaned over his mother, Samira, cradling her head in his arms as fellow Red Crescent medics tried to console him.

Bardini had unknowingly sat in the ambulance beside her body wrapped in a blood-stained white sheet as the vehicle bounced across broken roads to reach al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.

Having arrived at the medical facility, he unloaded the stretcher, squinting into the late afternoon sun as he wheeled the body across the hospital courtyard.

In this image made from an Associated Press video, medic Abed Bardini mourns next to the body of his mother on October 30, 2024, in Deir al-Balah on the Gaza Strip.

The hospital staff pulled back the blanket to check Samira for signs of life and Bardini's strength collapsed. He later sat in the morgue beside her mother’s body with his head in his hands.

Bardini's Red Crescent colleagues held a funeral prayer over her body in the parking lot, and then Bardini personally helped carry the body into an ambulance for burial.

Israel waged a genocidal Gaza onslaught on October 7, 2023, after Hamas-led resistance groups carried out a historic operation against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.