Together – wrote Muhammad Al-Laham – Chairman of the Freedoms Committee of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate – The world could not contain her joy when Ola, who was born in the United Arab Emirates, returned to her homeland and touched the soil of Gaza in the year 2006, and went towards her dream of studying, chasing news and conveying the concerns and aspirations of Palestine to the world.
She joined the institute and studied media and public relations and completed a bachelor’s degree in media and mass communication at Al-Azhar University. She also had a great passion for media work through writing and standing in front of the camera, as well as radio work, which she joined through Sawt Al-Watan Radio in Gaza as an editor and presenter of news and programmes.
Ola Dahdouh was very happy when she was granted family reunification and obtained a Palestinian identity card and a Palestinian passport. She also had a big party with good food and drinks, to which she invited family and friends. She was extrem
ely happy, planning to use her passport for a trip outside the bottleneck, ‘Gaza.’
With the intensification of the bombing in the war launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip on October 7 of last year, Ola was hoping to reach the radio headquarters so that the world could hear over the air the extent of the wound and the groaning, but the radio site was destroyed and the Al-Jalaa Street area was targeted, and even the nearby Ibn Ammar School was destroyed by belts. Fireworks, explosions, and missiles were much louder than Ola’s dreams, and her voice faded as she worked to produce some report from home.
Ola’s close friend is journalist Fidaa Helles, a satellite correspondent and an agency, who succeeded in speaking to her after many attempts due to the difficulty of communication, in order to offer her condolences for the loss of her loved ones.
In our conversation over the phone, she said: ‘Ola was my dearest friend and soul mate, and because of my great love and attachment to her, I contributed to her marryin
g my cousin so that she could stay close to me.’ I was imagining tears mixed with a smile as she said to me, ‘I proposed to my cousin, my beloved.’
The Fidaa Helles family lives in Gaza City and left it after a week of war due to the seriousness of the situation there and the intensification of the bombing. They settled in a UNRWA school in Deir al-Balah, and after 27 days, the family also decided to return home in the hope that things had become better and they could live in the place, but the occupation escalated its attacks on the area. The house was filled with terrifying fire belts, missiles, and artillery shells, with only the decision to flee again to the UNRWA school in Deir al-Balah, perhaps to hide the groans of displacement and the danger of death lurking for everyone.
Ola lived in the Al-Zaytoun area and her husband was from Al-Shuja’iya. They had an only child, whom they named Karam. About two and a half months ago, with the intensification of the bombing on Al-Shuja’iya and Al-Zaytoun, Ola and
her husband moved to live in the Fida’a family’s two-story house, especially since the occupation army cut off the roads between the northern and central Gaza Strip. Preventing the return of the displaced, which prevented the possibility of the Fidaa family returning home.
Ola was happy despite the magnitude of the tragedy surrounding her when her parents, brothers, sister, and their children came to live with her. However, after a week, they decided to leave in search of a safer place despite the lack of safety in all places.
As for Fidaa, her heart was torn apart by the splits in her infant son’s skin when she was staying with her husband in the Al-Falujah area in Jabalia, and the place was bombed, so she could run to her little 12-day-old infant, whom she thought she had barricaded in a room whose glass did not withstand the bombing. She screamed from the shock of seeing how much glass had cut her skin. Her tender, tender baby, and she did not hear the sound of the missiles, as much as she was eager to h
ear her child’s screams, to eliminate doubt with the certainty that he was alive, and it became necessary to leave and migrate towards Rafah in the hope that it would be the last tent in the dance of death that has claimed about 36,000 people so far, but it is far from possible for the occupation to believe its announcements. The lie about safe places, where Rafah turned into a galaxy and an ember of fire, a holocaust and a massacre, and a new exodus trip to Deir al-Balah, where she now settles with her husband and son.
The last call was between Fidaa and Ola at approximately 19:12 on Friday evening, where Ola told her friend Fidaa that she had learned to cook new dishes and had to plan for their implementation and arrange the list of invitees for her. She was complaining and upset about the running out and loss of food supplies and that she was struggling to provide basic food supplies for her child, Karam. Even if a plate of eggs costs 200 shekels ($60), she has no options to satisfy her child’s hunger.
O
la returned in that call to express her renewed wishes to travel and said, ‘Oh Fida’, my son Karam, now he has grown up and is more than a year old, and you remember when I used to tell you that I will travel with Karam when he is less than a year old, and when Karam leaves, I will travel with him because it is easier and in the war he followed the Sunnah, and now he has become a year and six years old.’ For months, God willing, I will walk on the ground smoothly and I will not overcome the crossings, checkpoints and airports, and all indications are that the war can be stopped, travel matters will become easier, and I will fulfill my dream of taking my son and husband on a beautiful trip after this severe suffering.’
Hours after this call, and before daylight on Saturday, June 1, 2024, the Israeli missile was quickly emerging, transforming the house of the Fidaa family, where her soul mate lives, into great destruction, leaving a cloud of smoke and fire that did not dissipate, revealing the truth about Ola’
s travel, but not to the places she was planning to travel. Rather, her soul ascended to the Lord of the Worlds with a body full of fragments of missiles that tore him apart without showing mercy to her husband, whose life is still threatened by serious bloody injuries without the availability of treatment due to the occupation destroying hospitals, not allowing the entry of medicines, and killing medical staff.
As for Karam, a child who dreams of his traveling mother, with about a year and a half of this life on the ground of the Holocaust in Gaza, he no longer walks and has lost his ability to walk as a result of the size of the missile fragments that did not have mercy on his tender flesh, which his mother tried to protect even with her body that was gone.
Karam was on the treatment bed with bloody wounds on his feet, hoping that one day he would stand up and run with a bouquet of flowers towards the grave of his mother, who loved him to the point of madness, with dreams of flying him towards a future sh
e had planned a lot for, without knowing that the Israeli occupation’s plans would crush her dreams and bury her with this amount of gunpowder.
Ola was on the second floor, living with her husband and child, and Fida’s uncle, the retired teacher, Abd al-Rahman Nahed Helles, 72 years old, lived on the first floor of the house, only to be struck by the occupation’s missile and transported to the Lord of the Worlds, with bloody injuries to many of the family in the house.
Ola is a journalistic story that summarizes the stories of about 140 journalists who left with big dreams due to the occupation’s shortening of their lives, while Fidaa, with her wounded child and her sad soul over the loss of her friend, great uncle, and the destroyed family home, continues with hundreds of journalists on the journey of displacement and the search for life and safety more than the search for work, which has become A graveyard with many wounded and sad memories and dreams waiting to take off, but without knowing where to.
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ource: Maan News Agency