“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.
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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.
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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.