A world away from Gaza, Palestinian Americans in this New Jersey community hold their breath
“You haven’t checked your phone yet,” Mustafa’s sister said, “have you?”
“I spent the next three hours on my phone, crying uncontrollably,” Mustafa recalled to CNN. “Because I knew what was to come. And I just couldn’t – all I could think of was that, like, so many people are gonna get killed now. That’s all I could think. I’m like, this is gonna be horrible.” Noreen Rashid, a 21-year-old who like Mustafa grew up in New Jersey, had a similar reaction to news of the Hamas attack, she told CNN. She wondered what it would mean, in turn, for her parents’ families in Gaza. “I knew that, whatever the repercussions were going to be, were going to be hell,” she said.
Her family lives in that hell now. Six of her family members have been killed in Gaza, Rashid told CNN. Among them were her little cousins, 12-year-old Nouran Allouh and 10-year-old Razan Allouh — two of the more than 4,700 children killed in Gaza since October 7, per the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah, which draws its figures from sources in Hamas-run Gaza.
It’s unclear how exactly the girls were killed, Rashid said, but they had stepped out to fill a bucket of water to use as a shower when the family heard a noise — a sniper, they believe — and looked out to see the sisters lying dead on the ground.
Their father Ahmad Allouh “lived for his daughters,” Rashid said, describing him as headstrong and firm, a protector – the kind of man who built his daughters’ bedroom furniture himself. Their killings cast him immediately into a state Rashid’s grandmother likened to a psychosis, the 21-year-old told CNN.
Despite his family’s pleas, Rashid’s uncle went outside to cover his daughters’ bodies, she said. And he lay down between them to say goodbye.
“And then they shot him,” Rashid told CNN. “They killed all three of them.”
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