For three years since the outbreak of hostilities in October 2023, 34-year-old Nisreen Touman has endured an extraordinary sequence of personal grief, losing two husbands and two young children to military strikes in central Gaza. Prior to the conflict, Touman maintained a stable household in the Nuseirat refugee camp alongside her 35-year-old husband, Sami, and their two sons, Mahmoud and Laith. That domestic stability unraveled entirely during a sequence of intense bombardments across the central governorate.
June 8, 2024, permanently altered the course of her life.
The family had returned home after visiting relatives displaced to al-Mawasi in southern Gaza when sudden aerial strikes and small-arms fire shook their neighborhood. Sami rushed outside to gather the neighborhood children into the residential building, where 25 extended family members were sheltering. While observing the street, he sustained a fatal gunshot wound to the head from an overhead surveillance quadcopter. Moments later, an aircraft dropped munitions directly onto the residence, collapsing the floors into pulverized concrete.
Sifting through the suffocating gray dust, Touman discovered both of her children motionless on the ground.
Her five-year-old and two-year-old sons had suffered fatal trauma, one showing visible cranial wounds while the other appeared peacefully asleep. For two hours, Touman sat immobilized in the wreckage holding the bodies of her sons as artillery continued to strike the surrounding blocks, until international humanitarian coordinators secured their evacuation to a hospital. The operation that devastated her household coincided with an Israeli military raid in Nuseirat aimed at retrieving four captives. United Nations data confirmed that 89 residential buildings were leveled during the four-hour assault, while the Gaza Health Ministry reported 274 Palestinian fatalities and 698 wounded on that single date.
The strike claimed 18 members of her extended family, including her sister Sabreen, her mother-in-law, two brothers-in-law, and multiple young cousins.
Following months of isolation in an al-Mawasi tent, Touman agreed to a pragmatic marriage proposal from her late sister’s husband, who was also her first husband`s surviving brother. The arrangement was forged around raising her sister’s four orphaned children, including a one-year-old infant who required immediate maternal care. Over time, the new household found a measure of shared stability, prompting Touman to pursue pregnancy again to reclaim the experience of motherhood.
That fragile security collapsed eight months later on July 8, 2025, when her second husband, Mohammed, was killed in an airstrike near al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat.
Four months after Mohammed`s death, Touman gave birth to their daughter, Sidra, who turns one year old this October. While caring for the infant provides an anchor against ongoing hardship, Touman acknowledges the sorrow of raising a child who will never know her father.
Today, Touman lives with Sidra at her parents’ residence in Gaza City, focusing her daily efforts entirely on protecting her surviving daughter.
