The hospital waiting room was quiet on Sunday: There was no crowd of relatives, no flood of patients. Israel’s air defenses had just repulsed a large-scale Iranian attack, with only one serious casualty recorded.
But there was no sense that a crisis had been averted outside the pediatric intensive care unit at Soroka Medical Center in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba. Instead, tension filled the air until the ward doors opened and a panting mother stumbled out, her face contorted. Then the raw emotion quickly took over as she collapsed into a chair, sobbing.
While Israel suffered little significant damage overnight, this family was dealt a devastating blow. Amina al-Hasoni, 7, was clinging to life – the only serious casualty of the Iranian barrage. And if there weren’t systemic inequalities in Israel, her relatives said, she might have been spared.
There are about 300,000 Bedouin Arabs in the Negev desert. About a quarter of them live in villages not recognized by Israeli officials. Without state recognition, these communities have long suffered from a lack of planning and basic services such as running water, sewerage and electricity. And few have access to bomb shelters, despite repeated requests to the state.
The Hassoni family lives in one such community, sharing a hilltop in the Negev village of al-Fura with a plot of detached houses. When missile warning sirens went off on Saturday night, Amina’s uncle Ismail said he felt stuck — with nowhere to go.
The arms above showed anti-aircraft defenses intercepting missiles before a large explosion occurred. Then he heard a woman scream — his sister — and “I started running,” he said.
Ismail, 38, found his sister outside her home holding Amina, who was bleeding from the head. Her family had decided to flee the missiles, running out the front door. But Amina, sleeping in a back room with pink walls covered in painted butterflies, didn’t make it.
A shrapnel tore through the thin metal roof of the house, opening a hole with sharp metal edges. He crashed right in front of the door – where Amina fell unconscious.
“I think he hit her while she was running away,” Ishmael said.
He said he took the injured Amina from his sister and lifted the girl in his arms. Ismail then found a car that drove her to the hospital, more than 40 minutes away on a damaged, winding road that in some places fades away, in others crossed by camels.
Only then, with Amina on her way, did he go inside the house, where he said he saw a large, black piece of shrapnel about the size of a pretzel jar. And “there was blood,” he said, a puddle that had turned into a stream on the tile floor, all the way to the front door.
By Sunday afternoon, the orange-patterned tiles had been cleaned. None of the dozens of relatives there could say who had done it, only that “it’s bad for children to see” all the blood. But Ishmael has not gone back inside.
“It’s hard,” he said, his jeans and boots still spattered with blood. Not far from where she sat, a pink Minnie Mouse blanket and a little black and white girl’s dress hung on a family clothesline.
“We could have built shelters here,” Ismail added.
He dismissed any suggestion that what happened to Amina was bad luck.
“It’s part of a policy,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.”
The shrapnel that tore through Amina’s home was one of more than 150 that were collected in the area on Sunday by police bomb disposal teams, and the family said officers had removed the fragment that hit their home. Teams combed the desert for hours, searching for debris and removing huge chunks of twisted metal — efforts repeated across Israel.
Hassoni’s home is not far from a military base, Nevatim, which was reportedly the target of the Iranian attack and which Israeli officials said suffered minor damage.
That’s little consolation for Amina’s father, Muhammad, who spent the morning at the hospital taking turns at her bedside. He didn’t say much to her, she said, and just repeated her name.
Amina – the youngest of his 14 children – “likes to laugh and have fun all the time,” said Muhammad, 49. She is a good student with a “strong personality,” he added, who doesn’t always listen to instructions. And she likes to draw.
He called Iran’s actions “inhumane.”
“May God demolish them,” he said, without hesitation.
