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Will Israel kill Alaa Radwan's family in northern Gaza?

As Israel once again issues "evacuation orders" for northern Gaza, the Radwan family, unable to flee, faces a death sentence.

Dan Cohen

Alaa Radwan’s parents, Mahmoud and Rasmeyya. 

Alaa Radwan escaped from Gaza to Cairo with her husband and three small children in May 2024, having survived eight months of Israel’s mass slaughter.

I had met her in Gaza in 2015 through Dr. Refaat Alareer, her English literature professor.

We interviewed her paternal grandmother in Jabalya refugee camp, who vividly recalled how she tended to her land in the village of Najd, and at just 20 year old, survived the Nakba in 1948, escaping to nearby Gaza becoming a refugee. 

I last spoke to Alaa in 2017 as I was working on my documentary ‘Killing Gaza.’

In December 2023, two days after Alareer was killed along with his family, I reached out to Alaa to check on her. Her house in Gaza City, which she and her husband had saved to buy, had been obliterated by Israeli bombing, and she was sheltering in a house in Deir al Balah, in the middle area of the Gaza Strip.

With no money and no contacts, she was unable to find a way out and had given up hope.

With a few posts to my X account, my followers contributed enough money to pay for Alaa and her immediate family to travel. They escaped just days before Israel occupied and destroyed the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt.

Her parents, Mahmoud and Rasmeyya, and the rest of her family, were left behind. Like hundreds of thousands of others, they lived displaced in tent encampments inside what Israel cynically called “safe zones”, which it frequently bombed.

Her father, Mahmoud, suffers from a myriad of health issues. He has a heart condition, diabetes, kidney failure, high blood pressure, and underwent open heart surgery many years ago. As a result of diabetes, he had three toes amputated before the genocide, making the journey south on foot excruciatingly difficult.

Nonetheless, with the funds we raised, Alaa was also able to provide her parents and extended family with enough to purchase a small shelter with bathrooms and two water tanks.

In Cairo, she and her husband are unable to legally work and struggle to meet their daily needs. I have paid her what I’m able for translation work and she has taught online Arabic classes. This meager amount of money not only provides her immediately family, but for her parents and extended family in Gaza too.

With the January ceasefire, most of Alaa’s family making the journey back to northern Gaza, finding their home, like all others, destroyed and uninhabitable. Nonetheless, they decided to stay and eke out their lives in the rubble.

Since Israel broke the ceasefire, their situation became even more dire. Internet service is non-existent, requiring Alaa’s brother to walk miles to be able to send a message of reassurance that they are alive.

On March 21, the Israeli military issued “evacuation orders” for their northern Gaza neighborhood, waiting until just 15 minutes before they were set to break their Ramadan fast with whatever meager bits of food they could find. 

However, physically and mentally exhausted from more than a year of displacement, starvation and death facing them at every corner, Alaa’s family has chosen to stay in northern Gaza.

“They are going to be killed,” Alaa told me.

With the Israeli military launching another extermination campaign and ground invasion, and her family’s neighborhood listed as the first target, her chilling prediction seems to be all but a certainty.

On March 21, at 6pm, we wait to see what the fate of Alaa Radwan’s family will be.

Contribute to her GoFundMe campaign here.