Twice Widowed, Twice Bereaved: A Gaza Mother's Three-Year Ordeal of Loss and Endurance

For three years, Nisreen Touman has wept herself to sleep almost every night, haunted by the memory of everyone she has lost since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023. By the age of 34, she had been widowed twice — a fate that reflects the staggering toll the conflict has taken on Palestinian families, particularly women who have been left to rebuild their lives amid unrelenting destruction.

Before the war, Nisreen's life in Nuseirat, a refugee camp in central Gaza, was stable and content. She shared a home with her husband, Sami, then 35, and their two young sons, Mahmoud and Laith, aged five and two. "I had a home and a complete family. I got along with my husband, and we were friends," she recalled, struggling to hold back tears as she described the life that was shattered.

That life ended on June 8, 2024, a day that would become one of the deadliest of the entire conflict. Nisreen and her family had been visiting relatives who had been displaced to al-Mawasi in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza. Upon returning to Nuseirat, the children went out to play in the street. Nisreen was upstairs with Sami when the couple suddenly heard heavy explosions and gunfire erupting very close to their home.

Sami rushed outside to bring the children and his siblings' children to safety, as about 25 members of the extended family were staying in the building. He then went back out to assess the situation while aircraft circled overhead. Those were the final moments Nisreen would ever see her husband alive. She later learned that a quadcopter drone had shot him in the head.

Only minutes later, as Nisreen tried to calm the terrified children amid the ongoing bombardment, an Israeli aircraft struck the house directly. She blacked out briefly and then awoke to a cloud of thick dust that made it impossible to see anything. As the dust settled, she began to grasp the horror: their home had been bombed. She could hear relatives screaming and saw blood and body parts scattered around. She began shouting desperately for her sons.

Nisreen breaks down when she describes what she saw next. Her two children lay on the ground — one with catastrophic head injuries, the other looking as though he were merely asleep. "I knew from that moment that I had lost them. It was clear that they were dead," she said. Overcome by shock, she found herself unable to move.

Her husband's brother eventually came and placed the children in her arms. "I could not speak. I was completely unable to speak, just tears running silently," she remembered. "Everyone around me was screaming and crying." For two hours, Nisreen cradled her dead sons as the family, including the wounded, remained trapped inside the damaged house while bombing and gunfire continued outside. Only after repeated appeals to the International Committee of the Red Cross was the family finally evacuated to a hospital.

The attack that killed Nisreen's husband and children occurred during an Israeli military operation in Nuseirat camp aimed at rescuing four Israeli captives who had been seized during the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. According to the United Nations, 89 inhabited houses and residential buildings were struck during nearly four hours of bombardment. Gaza's Health Ministry reported that 274 Palestinians were killed and 698 wounded that day alone.

Eighteen members of Nisreen's husband's family died in the assault, including Sami and their two sons, her 36-year-old sister Sabreen, her mother-in-law, two of her husband's brothers and their children, along with other extended relatives. The scale of the loss left Nisreen utterly devastated.

She returned alone to her family's tent in al-Mawasi, south of Gaza, where she grappled with trauma and grief. Four and a half months later, she faced a difficult decision: her late sister's husband — who was also her first husband's brother — proposed marriage. He wanted Nisreen to help raise his four children, who had lost their mother. Nisreen initially refused, saying she had no desire to start a family or marry again. She eventually consented out of a wish to care for her deceased sister's children, particularly the youngest, who was only one year old at the time.

Nisreen has been candid that her second marriage was not built on romance. "I had lost my husband, and he had lost his wife. I had lost my children, and the four children had lost their mother," she explained. The arrangement allowed two grieving people to fill the roles left vacant by those they had lost. In her sister's children, Nisreen found a measure of comfort for the absence of her own sons.

But her new life brought formidable challenges, especially in the early months. She was still mourning her first husband and her children when she remarried. Then, in July 2025 — eight months into the marriage, while she was pregnant — her second husband died, leaving her widowed for a second time before she had even given birth to their child.

Nisreen's story is one of countless accounts of loss emerging from Gaza, where the health ministry has reported tens of thousands of deaths since October 2023, a majority of them women and children. Humanitarian organizations have repeatedly warned that women in Gaza face compounded vulnerabilities, including widowhood, displacement, and the burden of caring for surviving relatives in conditions of extreme deprivation. For families like Nisreen's, the war's legacy is measured not only in death but in the enduring psychological scars borne by those left behind.