She says the Israeli military killed her husband and daughter. Soldiers then took her to an Israeli hospital

CNN
—

Sham Abu Tabaq, 5 years old, has a piercing gaze. Behind her dark eyes lie memories that she has barely begun to process.

She experienced the war. She was driven from her home. And she lay in her father's arms when he was shot and saw him and her older sister lying dying on the street.

But this is not the increasingly typical story of tragedy and loss in Gaza. This is evident in the place where CNN met Sham and her mother, Sanaa: a Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem.

And then there is this: Sanaa does not just blame the Israeli military for the killing of her husband and daughter and for the shooting in the leg – although she certainly blames the Israeli military as well.

An Israeli soldier may also have saved her life.

This should not be unusual. All armed forces are obliged under international law to help injured civilians. But in the Gaza war, stories like the one from Sanaa are extremely rare.

“He felt sorry for us,” she said of the soldier. But he and his comrades, she said, “also took the most valuable thing I owned.”

Sanaa and her husband Akram – a teacher – lived with their daughters Sham and Yasmeen in Beit Lahia, in the northernmost part of Gaza.

She worked for a foundation that supports orphans. Like many women in Gaza, she dressed conservatively and often covered her face, which is marked by deep burn scars from a childhood accident.

In the days following Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli military campaign that followed, the family was forced to leave their home – fleeing Israel's unprecedented bombardment of Gaza. When a brief ceasefire was announced in late November as part of a hostage rescue operation, they saw an opportunity to return.

“We were so happy that we couldn't even sleep,” Sanaa recalls. “There was a ceasefire and we wanted to go home.”

They left the United Nations-run health clinic in Jabalya refugee camp where they had been staying and began the roughly five-kilometer (3.1-mile) walk. They were almost home, she said, when gunshots rang out.

“It was as if there was a sniper there and he was shooting at us. We didn't see him,” she said. “Suddenly we were all injured.”

Seven-year-old Yasmeen was in the worst condition. She had been shot in the back and shoulder. Akram was hit in the stomach and Sanaa in the leg. Only Sham was unharmed by the hail of bullets.

“My husband said to me, 'Let's crawl, maybe we can find an ambulance to take us, or maybe someone will see us and help us.' But I couldn't crawl. And Yasmeen was in a terrible state – she had been hit by two bullets and was covered in blood. So I told him, 'You can't do that.' He said, 'I'm trying to crawl.' So he crawled a little bit. They finished him off! He stayed where he was. He was killed,” Sanaa said.

They lay in the middle of the road for several hours – too injured and too scared to move. Sanaa held Yasmeen in her arms and promised her daughter that an ambulance was on the way and that they would survive. But there was no help on the way. False hope was all Sanaa could give her daughter at that moment.

Yasmeen lost her life and succumbed to her injuries.

“I laid my daughter Yasmeen on the ground, may God bless her soul. And I covered her with a blouse. And I said to Sham, 'Come, darling, let's crawl.'”

They crawled across the floor, speaking in whispers, leaving the bodies of their families behind, and entered a partially bombed two-story house. As darkness fell, they crowded into a bathroom.

“In the morning, around 7:30 a.m., we heard the sounds of the Israelis and the tanks,” Sanaa said. “I told her, 'Don't do that, my darling, the Israelis have come. They will shoot at us. But don't be afraid. It's over. And we will die.' She said, 'Okay, mom, but hide me. I don't want to see them when they come and shoot at me.'”

As Sanaa held her daughter in her arms, an explosion rocked the house. The door of the bathroom where they were huddled was blown down and the window above them shattered, raining down shards of glass.

Soon the soldiers were inside the house. After a few tense moments of shouting, she said, the soldiers were convinced that Sanaa and Sham were not harboring militants and tended to her wounds.

CNN obtained footage of the moment from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), captured by a soldier's body camera. The video, which contains no audio, shows two soldiers applying bandages while Sanaa – curled up in a corner – speaks to someone off-screen. The IDF would not make any of the soldiers in question available for an interview with CNN.

Sanaa soon began pleading with an Arabic-speaking soldier, who denied that his troops had killed Sanaa's husband and eldest daughter and instead blamed Hamas and its leader Yahya Sinwar for their deaths.

Sanaa and her daughter describe what happened the night the IDF came

“I told him, 'Please hand me over to an ambulance to Gaza (city). Can you at least take me to my family so they can take my daughter? I'm not important. I know I'm going to die. I just want my family to take my daughter.'”

“He told me, 'No, we cannot hand you over to Gaza. Wait a little longer. Maybe I can help you,'” Sanaa said.

Sanaa says the Israeli soldiers concluded they could not treat her on the spot. Her condition was critical, she says, and she needed to be treated in a hospital. After several phone calls, she recalls, the Arabic-speaking soldier said they would take her to a hospital in Israel. They carried her out of the house on a stretcher, along with Sham.

Sanaa says as she was being loaded into a Humvee, she saw the body of her daughter Yasmeen in the street.

“I told him, 'This is Yasmeen. Please bring her to me.' He said no. I told him, 'Then please bury her for me,'” Sanaa recalled. “They moved on with the stretcher.”

An hour's drive later, Sanaa says, they arrived at what appeared to be an almost empty military base. In an open area, soldiers conducting a security check ordered Sanaa to remove her jilbab – a garment that covers the entire body – in front of female soldiers. The male soldiers said they would look away. All the while, she continued to bleed from the gunshot wound to her leg.

“Then they made me take off my blouse and underwear,” she recalled. “It was just a pretense – they took off all her clothes too.”

“If it hadn't been for Sham, I wouldn't have agreed to take off my clothes. Because I was afraid that if I didn't take off my clothes, they would shoot Sham. Or they would shoot me in front of Sham and I would never know what happened to her. If I had been alone, I would have preferred that they shot me and I wouldn't have taken off my clothes.”

They continued to Kaplan Medical Center in the central Israeli city of Rehovot, where doctors treated her wounds. CNN obtained Sanaa's medical records, which show that a bullet pierced her right calf, breaking both bones and damaging an artery. She was then transferred to a Palestinian hospital in Jerusalem to recover.

For nine months, she slowly recovered and received physical therapy. She and Sham lived in a shared hospital room. She has no idea what happened to the bodies of her daughter and husband.

It is a disturbing limbo – aware of the privilege of their security, yet longing for a home and a life that has irrevocably changed.

And she is terrified of being sent back to the war zone that was once her home. In fact, Israeli authorities now plan to send the two back to Gaza next month unless another government takes them in, according to hospital workers, Israeli officials and human rights organizations.

The Israeli military denies that its soldiers shot at Sanaa and her family.

In a statement to CNN, the Israeli army said the family had inadvertently approached a hidden Israeli position. When soldiers shouted at the family to stop, their position was revealed to nearby militants, who then opened fire on the Israelis. The family, the Israeli army said, was “engaged in a fierce exchange of fire.” “The soldiers did not open fire on the four individuals, nor did they aim at them,” it added.

Sanaa dismissed this claim as a lie. The IDF claimed that the militants fired grenades at its positions – Sanaa said it did not hear any explosions.

“If we had heard the voice of the Israelis, we would have fled and returned (to the shelter). If we had heard the voice of the resistance, we would have fled and returned,” Sanaa said.

“It’s true, he helped me,” says Sanaa about the Arabic-speaking soldier who made the decision to bring her from Gaza to Israel easier.

But she doesn't have the heart to thank him. And she says she wouldn't do it even if she saw him again.

“It was a miracle from God that the soldier who spoke to me in Arabic helped me,” she said.

“This is God standing by me and showing mercy to me. It comes from God,” she said. “Not from the soldier's own will.”

Watch the full video story from CNN