On Jan. 29, 2024, my daughter Hind’s voice reached me for the last time. It’s been two years, but its absence is still the loudest sound in our home.
That day, Hind was trapped in a small car surrounded by Israeli Army tanks. Her cousins lay dead beside her. Her clothes were soaked in their blood. She was 5 years old, whispering to me on the phone that she needed to go to the bathroom. She also spoke to rescue dispatchers, who tried to comfort her during the wait for an ambulance, an exchange that was recorded and later heard around the world.
My daughter Hind Rajab was born on May 3, 2018, after years of infertility, years of praying, years of believing God had closed a door that would never open.
When I finally became pregnant, I felt like I was carrying hope itself. Her birth was difficult — she almost didn’t survive — but when they placed her tiny body in my arms, I whispered a prayer that became a promise between us: “God, let her scent stay with me. And when life shatters me, let Hind’s scent be what helps me keep going.”
I didn’t know that this prayer, a simple wish from a new mother, would become the only thread holding me together in the nightmare that was to come.
Life in Gaza is not like life anywhere else. My children and I haven’t known what people in other countries might call an ordinary life. We’ve only ever lived on the brink of displacement or death. In our darkest moments, when fear closed in and survival felt impossible, the scent of Hind would calm me.
Everything we had endured as a family suddenly felt as if it had been leading to that unbearable moment two years ago. We had been through constant Israeli bombardment. We had run for our lives more times than I can count. On Jan. 29, we had to flee again. After Hind got into a car with six family members, the car was shot at. Everyone in the car except Hind was killed.
Hearing my daughter trapped, begging for my help, was a kind of pain no mother should experience.
As I spoke to her, Palestine Red Crescent Society workers were also on the phone with her at their base. They knew exactly where she was. Before I lost contact with her, an ambulance was minutes away. Minutes.
They had tried to get permission from Israeli authorities to rescue her earlier, but it took about three hours to receive the green light. When an ambulance finally was dispatched and got close to Hind, it was fired on and the two paramedics on board were killed. Nearly two weeks later, Hind was found dead in the car. Israeli forces have said the ambulance didn’t need their permission, and that they had not been in the area. But <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/AHwVr/www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2024/hind-rajab-israel-gaza-killing-timeline/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">multiple <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/AHwVr/forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-hind-rajab" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">investigations determined that they were present and likely killed Hind and our other family members.
Here is what I know: My daughter died alone, pleading for someone to come get her. I couldn’t.
Hind was smart beyond her years. I taught her to write before she ever set foot in a classroom. I still have her first school notebook. When she started school, the teachers were amazed: She had answers to everything, in Arabic and English. She loved her little brother, Iyad, with a tenderness I can hardly put into words. She cared for him in ways far beyond her age — a true older sister, a protector. Even now, he asks, “What am I supposed to do without her?”
I don’t have the answer.
No child deserves to die like Hind did, just as no child should live under the constant threat of bombardment, starvation and displacement. My daughter was just one among tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza whose stories ended before they began. At least <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/AHwVr/www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-20000-children-killed-23-months-war-more-one-child-killed-every-hour" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">20,000 children have been killed since October 2023. Twenty thousand futures, erased.
When the filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania contacted me to make a <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/AHwVr/www.thevoiceofhindrajabfilm.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">film about Hind’s last hours, I was hesitant. I was still drowning in grief. The idea of reliving those moments terrified me. But I also knew that if the world did not listen to Hind, her killing would become another lost number. Maybe if the world heard her voice, I thought, other children could be saved.
Protecting the children in Gaza must mean real protection. For a start, it means a cease-fire that actually saves lives, not one that exists only on paper; more than <a class="break-all" href="https://archive.is/o/AHwVr/www.unicef.org/press-releases/during-gazas-ceasefire-children-keep-being-killed" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">100 children have been killed since the cease-fire officially began. It means stopping the bombing, and the international flow of weapons to a regime that clearly seeks to crush our spirit and erase us. It means opening more medical corridors and allowing more food in. It means ensuring accountability, not only for Hind’s death but for those of the thousands of children whose lives were stolen.
When the world is silent as children are killed, starved and displaced, that silence is complicity. Every child who dies waiting to be saved represents a failure of humanity.
I am a mother from Gaza. I once wore my daughter’s scent like armor to keep me going. Now I wear it because it’s all I have left. I live to carry Hind’s voice so that other children might be saved. Let it be the one that moves the world to finally see that the children of Gaza have the right to live, grow and dream, just like all other children.
My daughter Hind’s killing has not broken me. It leaves me with a mother’s responsibility to try and ensure no other child is left unheard.