Widowed twice: Gaza mother endures unimaginable loss across three years of war

Nisreen Touman is 34 years old and has been widowed twice. She has lost two children. She has lost a sister. She has lost eighteen members of her extended family in a single day. For three years, since October 2023, she has gone to bed each night in tears.

Before the war, Nisreen lived in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, with her husband Sami, who was 35. They had two children: Mahmoud, five years old, and Laith, who was two. By her own account, they were happy. She and Sami were friends. They had a home and a complete family. On June 8, 2024, that life ended in the span of minutes.

Nisreen and her family had been visiting relatives who had fled to al-Mawasi, in Khan Younis. When they returned home, the children were playing in the street. Everything felt normal. Then the bombing started—heavy, very close. Sami rushed outside to gather the children and bring them inside, where twenty-five family members had taken shelter. He went back out to see what was happening as aircraft circled overhead. That was the last time Nisreen saw him alive. A quadcopter shot him in the head.

Minutes later, as Nisreen tried to calm the children through the continued bombing and gunfire, an Israeli aircraft struck the house. The blast knocked her unconscious. When she woke, thick dust blocked everything from view. As it cleared, she understood: the house had been bombed. She heard screaming, saw blood and body parts scattered. She began shouting for her children. She found them lying on the ground. One had severe head injuries. The other looked as though he were sleeping. She knew immediately they were dead. For two hours, she held both of them in her arms while the family remained trapped in the damaged home as gunfire and bombing continued outside. An appeal to the International Committee of the Red Cross eventually brought evacuation to a hospital.

June 8, 2024, was one of the bloodiest days of the war. Israeli forces had launched a military operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp to rescue four Israeli captives. In nearly four hours of bombing, the United Nations documented that 89 inhabited houses and residential buildings were targeted. Gaza's Health Ministry reported 274 Palestinians killed and 698 wounded that single day. Eighteen members of Sami's family died, including Sami himself, both children, Nisreen's sister Sabreen who was 36, her mother-in-law, two of Sami's brothers and their children, and others from the extended family.

Nisreen returned alone to a tent in al-Mawasi, where she lived with her grief and trauma. Four and a half months later, her late sister's husband—who was also Sami's brother—proposed to her. He had four children who had lost their mother. He wanted Nisreen to help raise them. She resisted at first. She did not want to marry again or start a family. But she agreed because she wanted to care for the children, especially the youngest, who was only one year old. There were no romantic feelings in the marriage. As she explained it: she had lost her husband and he had lost his wife; she had lost her children and they had lost their mother. The marriage was a way for two grieving people to fill the roles of those they had lost. In her sister's children, Nisreen found a small comfort for the absence of her own.

The early months were difficult. She was still grieving Sami and her children while trying to adjust to a new husband and a new life. But gradually things stabilized. Nisreen began to think about having another child. She dreamed of her dead children every night, thought of them constantly. With encouragement from her mother, she decided to become pregnant again, to experience motherhood once more. Then, eight months into the second marriage, on July 8, 2025, her second husband Mohammed left to visit a friend after breakfast. Minutes later, an explosion shook the area. A neighbor told her that Mohammed had been killed in a strike near al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat.

This second loss felt harder than the first. She had believed she had finally found stability again. Now she was, as she put it, back at zero. She thought about the baby she was carrying, about her sister's four children who had now lost both their mother and father, about the new grief she was living through. The remaining months of her pregnancy were heavy. Four months after Mohammed's death, she gave birth to a daughter, Sidra. The child will turn one in October. Sidra has brought Nisreen what she calls a little compensation for three years of sadness, but it pains her that the girl will grow up without a father. Nisreen now lives with Sidra, isolated, preferring to stay quiet for hours and focus on her daughter. She visits her sister's four children, who are being cared for by their grandfather. She says she is afraid of making any new choices or trying to start another life after everything that has happened. No matter how much time passes, she cannot overcome the series of tragedies that have shaped her life. Sometimes, she says, it feels like she is living in an Indian film. But under the war, she adds, anything is possible.