Meet Naifa Al-Suda, the 94-year old Palestinian Grandmother Murdered by the Israeli Military

On March 21, 2024, the Israeli army raided the Nawati family’s home during their 15-day siege of al-Shifa Hospital and its surroundings in Gaza City.

At 6 AM, Israeli forces busted open their apartment door while the family was sleeping, according to Mohammad Saad Al-Nawati. “The Israeli troops pointed their weapons at my face,” Muhammad said. They forced the men to strip naked, Israel’s standard procedure during its raid on the hospital.

According to Mohammad, the Israeli soldiers then separated the men from the women. The men were interrogated naked, then sent to the al-Shuja'iyya neighborhood of Gaza City, southeast of their home.

The women, including Naifa Al-Suda, 94, were forced into a separate apartment in the building. Naifa had Alzheimer's disease and could not walk without help. She also relied on her family’s assistance to eat, bathe and use the bathroom. 

Then, the Israeli military forced the women to evacuate, except for Naifa. Mohammad’s aunt, Nawal, 54, asked the Israeli soldiers to allow her husband to carry Naifa, who was unable to walk on her own. 

In response, the Israeli soldier shot under Nawal’s feet, a practice commonly used by the Israeli military during its Gaza ground operations.

Mohammad’s aunt asked, “Where will you take her?" Naifa is bedridden, unable to move without assistance. The soldier fired another shot next to Nawal before pointing his rifle at her. "We'll take her to a safe place," the Israeli soldier shouted. “'If you don't move, I'll shoot you and everyone else.”

Then, Naifa was placed in her granddaughter's bed, and all of the other women were evacuated from the building, forcibly expelled from their homes and directed to move south.

The women headed to Wadi Gaza, an all-day journey on foot, where they met Rizq Al-Nawati, a grandson of Naifa. Rizq asked, “where is Naifa?" "Why is she not with you?" They informed him that the Israeli military forced them to leave her behind.

This incident took place during Israel’s second raid on al-Shifa Hospital, which lasted from March 18 to April 1. 

On April 6, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that al-Shifa hospital is “now an empty shell...no patients remain...most of the buildings are extensively damaged or destroyed and the majority of equipment is unusable or reduced to ashes.” The WHO team said the hospital was completely non-functional.

After the Israeli military withdrew from the al-Shifa hospital and its surroundings, Naifa’s family went looking for her. “We discovered our entire building had burned down,” Mohammad said. “All of the apartments in our building were reduced to ash, all of the furniture was reduced to ash. Nothing usable remained.”

“We went into my sister’s apartment, where we were forced to leave my grandmother,” Mohammad reported. “We discovered a skull, a spine, and other bones on her bed. This was all that remained of my grandmother, whose body burned to ash inside our home.”

Her cranium was identified by her teeth because she only had five teeth left. “That’s how we knew it was her,” Mohammad said. “This was all that was left of her remains.”

Mohammad added: "When I went up to the next floor, I found that my cousin, Alaa Maawiya Al-Nawati, and her husband, Mohammad Haboob, had been completely burned inside the apartment."

Since the raid, four mass graves with several hundred bodies have been uncovered at the site. Rami Dababesh, a Palestinian Civil Defence worker, told the BBC, “we’ve found corpses of women, children and individuals without heads as well as torn body parts.” Dr Mohamed Mughir added that there were signs of field executions, including “binding marks, gunshot wounds to the head and torture marks on the limbs were observed on the bodies of some martyrs."

The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor estimated in Dec. 2023 that the Israeli military had executed dozens of elderly Palestinians. In total, they counted some 1,049 elderly men and women killed, about 1% of the Gaza Strip's total elderly population of 107,000 people and approximately 3.9% of all Palestinian fatalities during the Israeli aggression. The number of elderly Palestinains killed by the Israeli military is now much higher, although exact figures are unknown.

The elderly are particularly vulnerable during armed conflicts, and international humanitarian law offers them extra protection. But Israel has shown total disregard for their legal obligation to ensure the elderly are safely evacuated from besieged areas. 

Naifa Al-Suda is survived by her 8 living children (2 have been missing since 1986 and 2010, respectively). She was a grandmother to 60 grandchildren. She was originally from Bir al-Saba and was expelled along with her family during the First Nakba in 1948.