BLAINE, Minnesota — Fatma Abumousa cannot stop checking her phone, looking for any updates on the crisis in Gaza.
Abumousa was born and raised in Gaza and lived there for nearly four decades. Her husband, Jehad Adwan, is also from Gaza and has called Minnesota home since 1998. The couple, along with their 21-month-old son, live in Blaine.
While following updates, they learned of an Israeli airstrike early Sunday morning.
"She heard that they bombed her hometown, and then the next blurb was... the neighborhood where she lived. And then the next blurb was her family's house," Adwan said.
Abumousa soon learned that her sister-in-law, cousin and three nephews were all killed in the attack.
"It was devastating to see and to hear the loss of life. The suffering these children had to go through," Adwan said.
Fatma's nephews Yusef, age 6, 7-year-old Abdelrahman and 18-year-old Hmaid were all killed.
Hmaid had just graduated high school. He was an artist who loved calligraphy and had dreams of studying overseas.
"She's very, very devastated for the children," Adwan translated for his wife. "The kids, she attended all their births. She held them as babies."
Sister-in-law Hiba Abumousa was a poet and published author.
"Her sister-in-law, her body was completely pulverized and they had to collect little bit here, little bit there... all these pieces put them together to bury her," Adwan said.
Abumousa's cousin, Hani Madhoun, fled the north believing he had found refuge in the south.
The family was in their multi-story building at the Khan Younis refugee camp when the attack happened. Israeli forces struck their building twice.
"This has been going on for too long. We've been suffering for 75 years since 1948 when Israel was established because my family, her family, were made refugees at the time," Adwan said.
Adwan explained how in Gaza you have a lot of multi-story buildings housing multiple generations of families.
"It's just so much and other families experienced much worse by multiple generations being wiped off completely from grandparents all the way down to grandkids. Completely. The Palestinians live in a very small piece of land called Gaza... 2.2 or 2.3 million people living in an area that is just about the boundaries, city of Minneapolis," Adwan explained.
When asked how they're processing the news of losing family members, Adwan said, "We don't have PTSD. We have ongoing trauma from this occupation... so it's really when we start processing is when this whole nightmare is over."
The couple is not only mourning the loss of their family members but worried about what will happen next. Many other family members were also injured in the attack.
Adwan added, "We know the horrors that were committed in the Holocaust, for example. And people said, 'Never again.' And never again means never again to anyone. Not only Jews, not only Christians... but to anybody."
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