After more than a year of Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, there were few blessings left for Talal and Samar al-Najjar to count by the time a ceasefire deal was agreed this month. Their home was in ruins, they and their children were displaced, and they were staving off hunger.
Yet they counted themselves lucky: their family of seven was intact, something to feel grateful for in the war between Israel and Hamas, which has killed tens of thousands. Many more are likely to be unearthed from the rubble.
Then, with only hours until the Palestinian enclave’s 15-month nightmare was set to pause, disaster struck.
Their 20-year-old son, Amr al-Najjar, had rushed to their village in southern Gaza, hoping to be the first one home. Instead, he became one of the last lives claimed before the fragile truce began.
“We’d been waiting so long for this moment, to celebrate the ceasefire, but our time of joy has turned into one of sorrow,” Talal al-Najjar (49), told the New York Times in an interview after the funeral for his son.
Not long after 8.30am on January 19th, when he thought – mistakenly – that the ceasefire had begun, Amr al-Najjar was killed alongside two cousins in what survivors said was an Israeli strike. The Israeli military denied it had attacked the area.
Their funeral was a humble affair. A cluster of relatives sat in a circle of plastic chairs to pray outside a dusty, sprawling camp of tarpaulin tents and wooden shacks on the outskirts of the southern city of Khan Younis. This is where the al-Najjars, like hundreds of other families, had sought refuge from Israeli bombardment in its campaign against Hamas.
Over the course of the war, which began in October 2023 after Hamas led an attack on Israel that, the Israelis say, killed about 1,200 people, more than 47,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Gaza health authorities. They do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The night before the ceasefire, the al-Najjars had packed up belongings in their makeshift tent. Samar al-Najjar (44), was eager to return to Khuzaa, their verdant farming village along Gaza’s southern border. She wanted to see what was left of their home, she said, and imagined herself greeting friends, relatives and neighbours with a joyful embrace.
But as they waited for sunrise, Samar al-Najjar could not repress a growing unease. Her son, Amr, who departed in the early hours of the morning, had left behind his bag. “He’d told me: I have a feeling I won’t come back,” she recalled, then broke into sobs.
The family knew that returning quickly to their home, less than a mile away from the frontier with Israel, to which Israeli tanks and troops would be withdrawing, might be risky.
But to many Gaza residents, all too familiar with periodic wars and the ceasefires that eventually end them, the first tentative hours of a truce are critical: Many race home to protect whatever has been spared in the war from looters who swoop in to snatch whatever can be sold from the ruins.
Amr al-Najjar’s brother Ahmad, who survived the attack, said the pair waited early on the Sunday the ceasefire was to take effect, along with two of their cousins, on the outskirts of Khuzaa, ready to enter at 8.30am, the scheduled start of the truce.
“They hoped to save whatever they could, like pieces of wood or any belongings,” their father said. The family could use the materials to build a shelter in their destroyed homes until aid groups could provide them with tents.
For Palestinians in Gaza, Talal al-Najjar said, the end of the fighting was not an end to their worries: “It’s another struggle – an internal battle to survive and rebuild whatever we can.”
As the two al-Najjar brothers set out, a cousin filmed Amr smiling on a motorbike, wearing a red T-shirt, a brown jacket and jeans. “You’re going to be the first people there!” the cousin shouted, laughing.
“And I’m going to return a martyr,” he replied with a smile.
For his parents, it was an unnerving premonition.
Not long after his sons left, Talal al-Najjar saw on the news that the truce had been delayed until 11.15am. In a panic, he and his wife tried repeatedly to call and text their sons and nephews. But the young men were in an area without reception – and had no way to learn of the ceasefire’s postponement.
From the outskirts of Khuzaa, Amr al-Najjar’s older brother Ahmad said, they listened and waited as fighting continued right up to 8.20 and then grew quiet. Shortly after 8.30, they entered the town, encouraged by the arrival of others doing the same.
Ahmad al-Najjar peeled away from the group after stumbling upon a gas cylinder, from which he hoped to retrieve a bit of fuel.
“Suddenly, I heard the whooshing sound of a missile,” he said. He dived behind a pile of rubble as an explosion shook the earth around him. “When I looked up, I saw smoke rising from the place they had been standing,” he said. “I couldn’t see them – only smoke.”
He fled the village amid tank, drone and sniper fire, he said, shocked and confused until he later learned that the truce had been delayed.
Israel’s military said it was “not aware of a strike” at the co-ordinates the Najjar family provided the New York Times.
Gaza’s emergency rescue services say 10 Gaza residents lost their lives between the time the ceasefire was meant to take effect and when it actually did. Residents of Khuzaa say the number killed in their village alone was 14.
None of the Najjar cousins who were killed, who ranged in age from 16 to 20, had ties to militant groups, their parents said.
Not long after the strike, Amr al-Najjar’s relatives began to search for the missing men. As one of them filmed himself trekking through torn-up roads and rubble in Khuzaa, he stumbled upon the lifeless body of a young man in a red T-shirt, brown jacket and jeans.
“Oh God, have mercy on you, Amr,” he can be heard moaning as he films the body. “God’s mercy upon you.”
Samar al-Najjar described her son as the kind of person who loved to tease and joke, and who as a grown man still begged her to make sweets.
More than a week into the ceasefire, his father is still struggling to find any solace in the moment he had so yearned for. Hope is a feeling from the days when he imagined that an end to the fighting would bring him the chance to watch his son build a future.
“All I wanted was to see him fulfil his dreams,” Talal al-Najjar said. “Now, my son is gone, and our dreams are gone with him.” − This article originally appeared in The New York Times
