Nahida Anton, 70, was the mother of the largest Catholic family in Gaza, with seven children and more than twenty grandchildren. Nahida and her daughter Samar, 49, were killed by an Israeli sniper inside the Catholic compound in Gaza on December 16, 2023.
Nahida originally came from a family of Palestinian refugees who fled in 1948 during the Nakba. She was born in 1953 in the Dbayeh refugee camp in Lebanon, which housed Palestinian and Syrian Christian refugees.
Her family was forced to flee to Yemen following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
She eventually managed to return to Gaza, where she volunteered for the local Catholic community. Her daughter Samar worked as a cook for children with disabilities, under the care of the Teresian Missionaries of Charity.
On December 16, after a siege of more than a month by the Israeli army—during which they destroyed solar panels and water tanks at the Catholic compound, resulting in several deaths—Nahida was shot three times by a sniper while crossing the courtyard to go to the restroom.
When Samar ran out and tried to help her fallen mother, she was shot in the head. Seven other people were shot. Later, Israeli bulldozers piled up wrecked cars from the street to block the church door. The wounded could not be evacuated until Christmas Eve.
Drawing by Carmen Fernández
Historia completa para imprimir: 054_Nahida_Samar_english.pdf
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