Israel’s air defences stood up to Iran – but they don’t cover where seven-year-old was hit

Al-Fur’ah, Israel: The hospital waiting room was quiet on Monday: there was no crowd of relatives, no flood of patients. Israel’s air defences had just fended off a large-scale Iranian attack, with only one serious casualty recorded.

There was no sense that a crisis had been averted outside the paediatric intensive care unit at Soroka Medical Centre in southern Israel’s city of Beersheba. Instead, tension filled the air until the doors to the ward swung open and a gasping mother stumbled out, her face contorted. Then raw emotion quickly took its place as she crumbled into a chair, crying.

Holes in the roof and floor at the home of Amina al-Hasoni, a seven-year-old girl who was injured by missile shrapnel.Credit: The New York Times

While Israel suffered little in the way of significant damage on Sunday (AEST), this one family was dealt a devastating blow. Amina al-Hasoni, 7, was clinging to life – the sole serious casualty of the Iranian barrage. And were it not for systemic inequities in Israel, her relatives said, maybe she too could have been spared.

There are roughly 300,000 Arab Bedouins in the Negev desert. About one-quarter of them live in villages that are not recognised by Israeli officials. Without state recognition, those communities have long suffered from a lack of planning and basic services including running water, sewers and electricity. And few have access to bomb shelters, despite repeated requests to the state.

The Hasoni family lives in one such community, sharing a hilltop in the Negev village of al-Fur’ah with a plot of disconnected houses. Amina’s uncle Ismail said he felt stuck when the rocket warning sirens went off – there was nowhere to go.

Booms overhead signalled air defences intercepting missiles before there was a big explosion. Then he heard a woman screaming – his sister – and “I started running,” he said.

Ismail, 38, found his sister outside her house holding Amina, who was bleeding from the head. Her family had decided to flee the rockets, running out the front door. But Amina, who slept in a back room with pink walls covered in painted butterflies, didn’t make it.

A missile fragment ripped through the home’s thin metal roof, shearing a hole with sharp metallic edges. It made impact just in front of the door – which is where Amina was knocked unconscious.

“I think it hit her while she was running away,” Ismail said.

He said he took the injured Amina from his sister and lifted the girl into his own arms. Ismail then tracked down a car that raced her toward the hospital, more than 40 minutes away on a rutted, winding road that fades out in some places, with camels crossing in others.

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 kettle. And “there was blood,” he said, a puddle that had turned into a stream across the tile floor, to the front door.

By Monday (AEST), the orange patterned tiles had been cleaned. None of the dozen or so relatives there could say who had done it, only that “it was bad for the children to see” all the blood. But Ismail hasn’t gone back inside.

“It’s difficult,” he said, his jeans and boots still spattered with blood. Not far from where he sat, a pink Minnie Mouse blanket and a small black-and-white girl’s dress hung on a family clothesline.

“We could have built shelters here,” Ismail added.

He dismissed any suggestions that what happened to Amina was bad luck.

“It’s part of a policy,” he said. “We can’t do anything.”

The missile fragment that tore into Amina’s home was one of more than 150 collected in the area by police bomb disposal teams, and the family said officers had taken away the piece that hit their home. The teams combed the desert for hours, searching for debris and carting away huge hunks of twisted metal – efforts repeated across Israel.

The Hasoni home is not far from a military base, Nevatim, that was reportedly a target of the Iranian assault and that Israeli officials said was lightly damaged.

That is little consolation to Amina’s father, Muhammad, who spent the morning at the hospital taking turns at her bedside. He didn’t say much to her, he 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’s a good student with a “strong personality,” he added, who doesn’t always listen to instructions. And she loves to draw.

He called Iran’s actions “inhumane”.

“May God demolish them,” he said, without hesitation.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.