An Eid celebration on a Gaza rooftop turns into a ‘horror movie’

Gaza City – On the first day of Eid al-Adha , Widad Al-Husari, 31, sat with her husband, children, and extended family on a rooftop in Gaza City , trying to create a sense of holiday spirit amid an ongoing war and displacement.

The family had dinner, then shared sweets, while the children, dressed in new clothes, played in their tent erected on the terrace until an explosion shattered the evening silence.

Widad rushed to the tent and picked up her three-year-old son, Rafiq, but in the panic, they plummeted through a hole caused by a missile that had penetrated the building.

The rest of the family followed her screams and found Widad clinging to her child and hanging from metal rods protruding from masonry several floors below. Underneath them, a fire raged, caused by a warhead that had detonated just seconds earlier.

“I didn’t notice the openings… It was dark everywhere and smoke filled the place. I was only holding my child when I suddenly fell with him into an opening,” Widad told Al Jazeera.

Widad points to three holes in the middle of the terrace, where the missiles struck, one of them the gap she had fallen through.

“I could feel the heat of the fire beneath me… Everyone was screaming, smoke filled the place, and I was hanging [from the metal rods] until my husband and brothers managed to pull me out with my child,” she said.

“When they [pulled] the iron rods cut my body, my legs, and my back. I lived through moments of hell, like a horror movie, and I still suffer from severe pain and fear to this moment. We were sitting eating Eid sweets, then suddenly everything turned into screams.”