‘No one calls me mum’: The Palestinian mother who lost all seven of her children in Gaza

“The world must act, not still watch, because we are not numbers and we are not headlines.”

The Israelis have erased more than 2,700 families entirely from the civil registry, killing every single member of those families during their ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip. A further 6,000 families have only one surviving member after nearly three years of genocide. The Israelis killed all seven of Sa’eda Ahmad Abu Odeh’s children and her husband when they struck the UNRWA school in Al-Shati, where they had sought shelter after being forcibly displaced, leaving her alone with the continuing trauma of survival.

Sa’eda, a UNRWA teacher, testified about her loss at a UN Human Rights Council side event in Geneva on June 25, 2026. The event highlighted violence against women and girls, including Palestinian mothers in Gaza.

“I am Sa’eda Ahmad Abu Odeh from Gaza, 42 years old,” she said at the event where her participation was facilitated by Al-Haq. “I am an English teacher with UNRWA. I was a mother for seven children, two sons and five daughters. The oldest one was 20 years and the youngest one was only three years.”

The bombing

The day she lost everything has become a familiar story in Gaza. Many of the sole survivors of their families had briefly stepped out of their homes or tents to fetch food, water, or medicines, only to return to the corpses of their loved ones.

Sa’eda recounted the moment she left the school where her husband and children were sheltering to search for basic necessities, only to learn moments later that an explosion had struck the shelter, killing and injuring those inside:

I went to the market just to bring basic necessities for them... I heard a loud explosion. I asked where it was, and I was told it was in the school shelter near the sea where my family were.

When she returned to the school, she found the shelter devastated. She was later taken to Al-Shifa Hospital, where she was asked to identify the remains of her children — a moment she described as the collapse of her entire world:

They asked me to identify my children’s dead body. It wasn’t a moment for recognition. It was a moment that my whole world collapsed in front of my eyes. Imagine a mother being asked to identify these are your children’s dead bodies and burned body parts or not.

Despite her enormous loss, Sa’eda describes herself as “a lucky mother in Gaza” because she was able to gather the remains of her children and bury them.

It’s a privilege that not many mothers in Gaza have had over the past three years. Israeli bombs have evaporated thousands of bodies; thousands remain buried under the rubble of their homes, and some were shredded so badly that family members were handed pieces of human flesh by the kilo in plastic bags.

Being a mother during genocide

“It was the end of everything, of life, end of stability, end of safety,” Sa’eda said.

For months after losing her children and husband, she was confined to a classroom in another shelter, unable to speak and leaving only to survive. She was also separated from her mother due to the Israeli policy of fragmenting the Gaza Strip and preventing movement.

During her time alone, Saeda said that her faith became her only source of strength.

For mothers in Gaza, the struggle to protect their children extended beyond the threat of violence. As food and basic necessities became increasingly scarce, mothers were left facing the unbearable reality of having nothing to give their children to eat. Sae’da said:

Mothers in Gaza suffered a lot during the war because there wasn’t anything to cook, to feed their children... Imagine that you couldn’t feed your children and you just start to tell them stories until they sleep because you haven’t anything to give them.

She recalled searching for wild herbs to survive and remembered her children asking only for “a quarter of a loaf of bread,” Al-Haq reported.

Endless suffering

The violence against Sa’eda’s family did not end with the killing of her husband and children.

The report added:

After moving to the south during the temporary ceasefire to reunite with her mother, another Israeli attack struck her brother’s family’s tent in Deir al-Balah, killing his wife and four of their seven children. Three of their surviving children sustained life-changing injuries. Today, Sa’eda cares for them in Jordan while they undergo medical treatment after her ten-year-old niece lost both legs, her sixteen-year-old niece lost an eye, and her nephew permanently lost the use of his arm.

Only weeks later, overwhelmed by successive losses, Sa’eda’s mother died after suffering a stroke.

She described the pain she feels at having lost all seven of her children in the Israeli genocide:

Because of this genocide, I miss every single moment of everyday life. I miss the word ‘mum.’ No one calls me mum. I miss their shouting, their voice, their faces. I lost my entire life.

“The silence of the world is the complicity of the genocide that happened in Gaza,” she concluded. “The world must act, not still watch, because we are not numbers and we are not headlines. We don’t ask for sympathy. We ask for justice and humanity. We ask for protection that every human being deserves.”

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