A Gaza Mother's Double Widowhood: Nisreen Touman's Story of Loss and Survival

In Gaza City, a 34-year-old mother named Nisreen Touman has endured a level of bereavement that few can imagine. Over the course of roughly two years, she has been widowed twice, lost two young children, and given birth to a child while mourning the death of her second husband. Her story, first reported by Al Jazeera, illustrates how the war in Gaza has shattered families in ways that extend far beyond the immediate violence of any single strike.

Before October 2023, Nisreen described her life as happy and stable. She lived in Nuseirat, a refugee camp in central Gaza, with her husband Sami, then 35, and their two sons, Mahmoud and Laith, aged five and two. In her recollection, the household was harmonious, and she and her husband were not merely partners but friends. "I had a home and a complete family," she told Al Jazeera, describing a domestic world that the war would soon erase.

The turning point came on June 8, 2024. Nisreen and her family had been visiting relatives who had been displaced to al-Mawasi, a coastal area in Khan Younis that Israel had designated as a humanitarian zone. They returned home to Nuseirat, and the children went out to play in the street. Nisreen was upstairs with her husband when they suddenly heard heavy bombing and gunfire erupting very close to their home.

Sami rushed outside to bring the children and his siblings' children into the house, where roughly 25 members of the extended family were sheltering. He then went out again to assess the situation as aircraft circled overhead. That was the last time Nisreen saw her husband alive. She later learned that he had been killed by a gunshot to the head fired from a quadcopter drone operating over the area.

Minutes after Sami's death, while Nisreen was trying to calm the children amid the continuing bombardment, an Israeli aircraft struck the house. She lost consciousness briefly and awoke to thick dust that obscured everything around her. As the dust cleared, she realized the building had been bombed. She heard screaming, saw blood and body parts, and began shouting for her children.

She described finding her two sons on the ground. One had sustained catastrophic head injuries; the other appeared to be sleeping. In that instant, she said, she understood that both were dead. She recalled being paralyzed by shock and unable to move. Her husband's brother eventually placed the children in her arms, and she sat holding them for two hours while the family, including the wounded, remained trapped inside the damaged house as gunfire and bombing continued around them.

The family was only evacuated after repeated appeals to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which eventually helped move them to a hospital. The strike that killed Nisreen's husband and children occurred on one of the deadliest days of the war. On that same date, Israeli forces launched a large-scale military operation in Nuseirat to rescue four Israeli captives taken during the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. According to the United Nations, 89 inhabited houses and residential buildings were targeted during nearly four hours of bombing. Gaza's Health Ministry reported that 274 Palestinians were killed and 698 wounded that day alone.

Within Nisreen's extended family, the toll was staggering. Eighteen members of her husband's family died in the violence, including Sami and their two sons, her sister Sabreen, 36, her mother-in-law, two of her husband's brothers, and several of their children, along with other relatives. The scale of the loss meant that Nisreen did not simply lose her immediate family; she lost the wider network of kinship that had sustained her.

After the killings, Nisreen returned alone to her family's tent in al-Mawasi, south of Gaza, where she tried to cope with grief and trauma. Four and a half months later, she faced a decision she had never anticipated. Her late sister's husband, who was also her first husband's brother, proposed marriage. He wanted Nisreen to help raise his four children, who had lost their mother, Sabreen.

Nisreen initially rejected the proposal outright. She said she did not want to marry again or start a new family. Eventually, however, she agreed, motivated primarily by a desire to care for her deceased sister's children, particularly the youngest, who was only a year old at the time. She has been candid that the marriage was not rooted in romance. As she put it, both she and her new husband had lost spouses, and while she had lost her children, his four children had lost their mother. The arrangement allowed two grieving people to fill the roles left vacant by those who had died.

Nisreen found some solace in caring for her sister's children, describing them as a partial comfort for the absence of her own sons. But the new household came with severe challenges, especially in its early months, as she continued to mourn Sami, Mahmoud, and Laith while adjusting to a radically different life. Eight months after the marriage, in July 2025, Nisreen's second husband died while she was pregnant. She was widowed for the second time before she had even given birth to their child.

Her experience reflects a broader pattern documented by aid agencies and human rights groups throughout the war: the collapse of household structures, the concentration of loss within extended families, and the particular vulnerability of widows and pregnant women in Gaza. When a single strike kills multiple generations, as happened in Nuseirat, the survivors are often left to rebuild families by merging with other shattered households, an arrangement born of necessity rather than choice.

For three years, by Nisreen's account, she has gone to bed in tears, remembering everything she has lost since October 2023. Her story does not conclude with recovery or resolution. It rests instead on the stark arithmetic of her life: two husbands buried, two children killed, a sister and eighteen relatives gone, a child born into a family already marked by death. In a war where casualty figures are often reported as totals, her account restores the individual dimensions of loss—the names, the ages, the relationships, and the impossible decisions that follow in the aftermath of each strike.