A Gaza Mother Widowed Twice: Nisreen Touman's Story of Loss and Survival

For three years, Nisreen Touman has fallen asleep in tears, haunted by the memory of everything the war in Gaza has taken from her. By the age of 34, she had been widowed twice, lost two young children, and endured a level of grief that few can imagine. Her story, shared with Al Jazeera from Gaza City, offers a window into the unrelenting toll that Israel's genocidal war on Gaza has exacted on Palestinian families since October 2023.

Before the war, Nisreen's life was stable and full. She lived in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, with her husband Sami, then 35, and their two 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. It was an ordinary happiness that would be shattered in a single afternoon.

On June 8, 2024, Nisreen and her family returned home after visiting relatives who had been displaced to al-Mawasi in Khan Younis. The children were playing in the street, and Nisreen was upstairs with Sami when the sound of heavy bombing and gunfire erupted nearby. Sami rushed outside to bring the children and his siblings' children indoors, where 25 family members were sheltering, then went out again to see what was happening as aircraft circled overhead.

That was the last time Nisreen saw her husband alive. She later learned that he had been shot in the head by a quadcopter drone hovering over the area. Minutes afterward, as she tried to calm the children amid the continuing bombardment, an Israeli aircraft struck the house directly.

Nisreen lost consciousness briefly and woke to thick dust that blocked out everything around her. As the dust cleared, she heard her family screaming and saw blood and body parts scattered around her. She began shouting for her children. She breaks down when she describes finding her two sons on the ground, one with severe head injuries and the other appearing 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, recalling how shock left her unable to move.

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

The attack that killed Nisreen's family came on one of the deadliest days of the war. On June 8, 2024, Israeli forces launched a military operation in the Nuseirat refugee camp to rescue four Israeli captives held since 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 bombing, and 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, Mahmoud and Laith, her sister Sabreen, 36, her mother-in-law, two of her husband's brothers, their children, and other extended relatives. The scale of the loss left Nisreen with no choice but to return alone to her family's tent in al-Mawasi, south of Gaza, where she grappled with trauma and grief while the war continued around her.

Four and a half months later, Nisreen faced a decision she never expected to make. Her late sister's husband, who was also her first husband's brother, proposed marriage. He wanted her to help raise his four children, who had lost their mother. "I strongly opposed it at first. I did not want to start a family or get married," Nisreen said. She eventually agreed, motivated above all by the need to care for her departed sister's children, especially the youngest, who was only one year old.

Nisreen is candid about the absence of romance in her second marriage. "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 small measure of comfort for the absence of her own sons.

That new life, however, brought significant challenges, particularly in its early months, as she continued to mourn her first husband and her two children. The emotional weight of caring for four orphans while processing her own losses was immense.

Then, in July 2025, eight months after remarrying and while she was pregnant, Nisreen lost her second husband as well. The news left her widowed for a second time before she had even reached her mid-thirties. Her account, published three years into the war, underscores how the conflict has reshaped and destroyed countless Palestinian families, leaving survivors to rebuild lives from fragments of what they once had.

Nisreen's experience reflects a wider humanitarian catastrophe. The United Nations and international aid organizations have repeatedly warned about the decimation of Gaza's civilian infrastructure, the destruction of homes and hospitals, and the psychological trauma inflicted on a population that has endured displacement, starvation, and repeated military operations. For families like Nisreen's, the loss of a spouse and children is compounded by the loss of the social networks and extended family structures that traditionally provide support in Palestinian society.

Parenting four children alone while grieving two husbands and two sons would be overwhelming under any circumstances. In Gaza, it is made even harder by the scarcity of food, medicine, and safe shelter. Aid agencies report that grief support and mental health services remain critically underfunded, even as the need has surged.

Nisreen's testimony also raises urgent questions about accountability. The June 8, 2024, operation in Nuseirat, which freed four captives, was one of the war's most lethal single days for Palestinian civilians. Human rights groups have pointed to the high civilian death toll and the destruction of residential buildings as evidence of disproportionate force, while Israel has said its operations target fighters and infrastructure.

For now, Nisreen's life is defined by survival. She has lost a first family and a second husband, and she carries the memory of holding her dead sons in her arms as bombing continued around her. Yet she remains in Gaza, raising her sister's orphaned children and living with the certainty that the war has taken almost everything else. Her story is one of thousands, but it captures the particular cruelty of a conflict that has left so many Palestinian women widowed, bereaved, and responsible for children who have lost both parents.