Hind Rajab was petrified.
She was trapped in a car with her aunt, uncle and four cousins. All of them were dead. An Israeli tank loomed outside the car. Night was falling. For three hours she begged on the phone, her voice small and often trembling, for someone to come get her.
Hind is 6 years old.
“Come take me. Please, will you come?” she said on an emergency call on Monday with a dispatcher at the Palestine Red Crescent Society, which released the recording.
Hind and her family had piled into the car, hoping to escape fighting near where they were staying in Gaza City. While near a gas station, a bombing killed or rendered unconscious five of her family members, the sixth, her 15-year-old cousin Layan, had survived.
Layan called for help. She told the operator that a tank was closing in, there was a burst of gun fire, and she began screaming. Then the line went dead. The next time dispatchers reached the number, it was Hind who answered.
Layan had been killed, Hind said. The dispatcher told Hind to continue to hide in the car and asked Hind if she was surrounded by gunfire.
“Yes,” she said, her voice choked.
The PRCS sent an ambulance team to rescue Hind several hours after the girls first made contact. Because it was an active combat area, the Palestinian emergency service said, it had to request and eventually received permission from Israeli authorities to go where the family’s vehicle had been trapped by fighting.
In response to requests for comment, the Israel Defense Forces told NBC News on Thursday it was “unfamiliar with the incident described,” which has received widespread coverage in both local and foreign press.
The PRCS said its paramedics Yousef Zeino and Ahmed al Madhoun had arrived in the area but lost contact by 7 p.m. local time on Monday. They are both missing, too, according the PRCS.
As desperation about their whereabouts mounts, family members and the PRCS have demanded answers from international organizations and the Israeli…
Read the full article here