Manar Khatib (45) and her daughter Hala (20) were killed by Iranian rocket fire in Tamra (northern Israel).
JTFMax
The names are now known. The smiles, frozen in photographs, now haunt a nation in mourning. Manar, 45, her daughters Hala, 20, and Shada, just 13, were killed when an Iranian missile struck their home in Tamra, a northern Israeli town of 35,000. Also among the dead was their cousin, Manar, 41. A single rocket collapsed the building where they lived, turning a place of safety into a grave.
The strike was part of a wider Iranian retaliation to Israeli airstrikes that had targeted military and nuclear sites inside Iran. But Iran’s missiles — blunt instruments of war — did not discriminate. Some struck far from military installations, landing instead in residential neighborhoods where civilians, not soldiers, paid the price.
In Tamra, the victims were members of Israel’s Christian Arab minority. Their house belonged to a respected lawyer, who happened to be away. Media reports say he had urged his family to take shelter that night. Whether they hesitated, accustomed to years of less-deadly rocket fire from Hezbollah in nearby Lebanon, or simply had no time — no one knows.
Images released by the Israeli Foreign Ministry show Shada, the youngest, wearing a flower in her hair, full of life. Her sister Hala, in her twenties, and mother Manar, appear in joyful, everyday moments. Now their names are etched into the widening human toll of a conflict spinning further from diplomacy and deeper into despair.
Shada was an Arab Christian and lived to be only 13 years old.
Elsewhere in Israel, tragedy repeated itself. An 8-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy were killed in Bat Yam, a coastal suburb south of Tel Aviv, in another overnight missile strike. According to Magen David Adom, the Israeli emergency service, at least 13 people have been killed so far by Iranian rocket fire.
The skies above Israel remained tense. Ben-Gurion Airport, the country’s main international hub, stayed shut for a third consecutive day. Airlines like Lufthansa have suspended flights to Tel Aviv until at least the end of July. Each closure, each warning siren, each explosion, speaks to a fragile nation under siege — and a wider region inching closer to catastrophe.
For those outside looking in, this may seem like another chapter in a conflict with no end. But for the families of Shada, Hala, Manar, and the many others, this is not geopolitics. This is an unbearable loss. No headline can capture what it means to hear a phone ring in the final moments, to search for loved ones in dust and rubble, to find silence where laughter once lived.
War continues to draw new lines on maps and in the sand. But it also draws heartbreaking absences around dinner tables, classrooms, and prayer services. And no amount of strategic explanation can ever make that just.
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