In astonishment and shock, the young man, Muhammad Saad, stood in front of his mother when he arrived home from visiting his fiancée Dania (20 years old). As if he was living a dream, less than 15 minutes ago he was in her house, before his phone vibrated and he received a phone call from her father, taking him out of his dream and asking him to go to the hospital.
Running, haunted by fears and worries, Muhammad returned to his fiancée’s house near his home again before he went to the hospital, and found him completely changed, roses scattered on the floor, his fiancée’s bedroom covered with rubble and rubble.
At two o’clock in the morning the day before yesterday, Alaa Adass, Dania’s father, woke up to the sound of the shaking of his house, as if an earthquake had struck the area. He opened his eyes and found himself moving from his bed on the floor due to the intensity of the bombing, which also broke the door to his room, and he spread out in the dust and smoke that completely obscured his view of his house.
With a panicked heart, he called out to his two daughters, Dania and Iman, but they did not respond to him. So, he turned to calling out to his only male son, Hamza (13 years old), and he answered him with fear clinging to his voice: “Hey, Yaba!” He came to feel the walls of the house and fall between the stones, while his clothes were filled with dust. The moment he realized that something was wrong. A big deal happened, and they started looking for the two sisters.
“I entered their room and they were completely under the rubble. I saw only the ends of their braids, and with the help of the neighbors we removed the rubble. Dania was a lifeless body without a breath, while her sister Iman was breathing.” His tears are still torn between falling or remaining trapped in his eyelids, trying to hold on as he tells the newspaper “Palestine”. The scene, which he described as similar to “doomsday.”
Wedding Party Turned into a Funeral
In the mosque, her fiancé, Muhammad, leans his back against the wall. I wish he could carry the weight of the pain of loss on him. His tearful eyes paint the wound of the homeland, while he is holding the Holy Qur’an and reciting its verses on the body of his fiancée, Dania, who is wrapped in a white shroud, instead of a wedding dress for their wedding, which is scheduled to take place two months later. So that the joy turns into a funeral, in a scene that was not devoid of Darwish’s verses: “This is the wedding that never ends (..) This is the Palestinian wedding, the beloved does not reach the beloved, except as a martyr or a homeless person.”
The last scene slows down before Muhammad, he takes a deep breath full of pain and his voice moves trying to hold on before starting to talk to “Palestine”: “I was like any groom waiting for his happiness, I told Dania on my last visit that I had booked the wedding hall, we agreed that we would choose the bedroom furniture this month, The time difference between my return home and receiving the news of her martyrdom was 15 minutes. I did not expect what happened.”
Dania, who is studying a BA in Accounting, fell asleep, hoping to wake up to a bright tomorrow and a new dream, to complete her happiness and complete her university studies as she skipped her second academic year, while her sister was in the eleventh grade looking forward to a bright future.
Although they used to sleep on two separate mattresses in the same room, they slept on the same mattress that night, when the occupation missiles killed their dream in a moment of calm and serenity.
Dream Assassination
Their father’s voice was weighed down by the loss: “Daniya was characterized by calmness, obedience, and sobriety, and her love for making those around her happy. She had memorized large portions of the Holy Qur’an, and I encouraged her to do so by giving her a gift if she completed memorizing portions of it, and this encouraged her to complete memorization in record time. As for her sister, She understood what I needed without asking.”
Three days ago, the family went out on an entertainment trip, during which Eman told her father about seeing her in a dream that she was “wearing a white dress and being married to a bride.” Her father smiled jokingly: “This dream is for your sister Dania, she is the matchmaker when you were young,” but he expressed his wish to see her as a bride: ” God willing, you will grow up and we will rejoice in you.”
A pillow mixed with a large blood stain of one of the two sisters, scattered roses and gifts, drawing tools that Iman used to buy and develop her talent with, traces of blood and a house that was destroyed every part of it, and a memorial photo that brought Muhammad together with his fiancée Dania, all of which remained witness to the assassination of the occupation, the dream of a bride whose joy was not complete, in A crime in which their neighbor, Khalil Al-Bahtini (44 years old), his wife Laila (42 years old) and their daughter Hajar (4 years old) were martyred.
