Gaza Widow’s Shocking Vigil: 7 Powerful Moments That Reveal War’s Brutal Toll

Aziza Qishta buried her husband Ibrahim alone in their Gaza garden after two months trapped under Israeli siege, wrapping his body in a window curtain for lack of a shroud. The elderly couple had refused to flee their home despite relentless bombardment, surviving on dwindling supplies after their children escaped. When shrapnel struck Ibrahim’s neck, Aziza carried his dying weight on her back for five hours through deserted streets.

After he passed, she dug a grave with her bare hands, whispering Quranic verses over his makeshift burial. Days later, she returned to find the grave desecrated by bullets, reburying his exposed remains with heartbreaking tenderness. Forced to flee starvation, she endured humiliation at an Israeli checkpoint where soldiers forced her to remove her hijab at gunpoint. Aziza’s solitary vigil—marked by unimaginable physical labor and profound grief—embodies both the crushing isolation of Gaza’s civilians and the fierce dignity that persists amidst annihilation. Her story is a raw testament to love that outlasted even war’s relentless erasure.

Gaza Widow’s Shocking Vigil: 7 Powerful Moments That Reveal War’s Brutal Toll

The grave wasn’t deep. There was no ceremonial washing, no white shroud, no murmuring crowd of mourners. Just Aziza Qishta, her 65-year-old hands clawing at the earth beneath an olive tree in her besieged garden in Khirbet al-Adas, southern Gaza. The shrapnel wound in her husband Ibrahim’s neck had finally stolen his life after two months trapped beneath an unrelenting Israeli siege. His shroud? A curtain torn from their shattered window. 

This is not merely a story of death in Gaza. It is a testament to a love that refused displacement and a dignity asserted in the face of annihilation. 

The Choice: Fifty Years and a Vow 

When the Israeli army reinvaded Rafah in March 2025, shattering the ceasefire, the world outside Aziza and Ibrahim’s home dissolved into chaos. Their children fled. Neighbours vanished. The cacophony of war – jets screaming, tanks rumbling, shells detonating – became their constant horizon. Ibrahim, 70 and blind, could not move easily. “I’m not leaving the house,” he declared. Aziza’s response was forged in five decades of shared life: “Of course. I won’t leave you after 50 years together. Never.” 

For two months, they were ghosts in their own home, surviving on dwindling stores of rice, lentils, jam, and pasta. Water was a perilous quest. Buildings collapsed around them – her son’s house next door, her cousins’ home nearby, burying more than ten relatives. Still, they held their ground, a tiny island of stubborn humanity in a sea of destruction. 

The Wound and the Weight 

The end came brutally. An explosion shattered their iron gate, engulfing the house in dust. When it cleared, Aziza found only one room and a bathroom standing. And Ibrahim, bleeding profusely from his neck. With a calm born of desperation, she cleaned the wound, applied antiseptic, and bandaged him. Then, she did the impossible. She lifted her husband’s heavy, inert body onto her back. 

“I had no one to help me,” she recounted, the memory etched in her voice. “We moved slowly. I would stop to let him rest, then continue.” For five agonizing hours, she carried him through the eerie silence of their devastated neighbourhood, finally reaching the relative shelter of her cousin’s bombed-out house. She laid him on a mattress. He refused food, accepting only a spoonful of honey and a little water. Then, a final request: “Pour some water on my head.” 

Aziza sat vigil. She noticed his hand trembling, offered to massage it. “No, leave it,” he whispered. Then, stillness. After 50 years, she was alone. 

The Burial: Love, Curtains, and Bullets 

No soldiers came. They bombed and moved on. Aziza faced the unbearable task alone. In her garden, she found a shallow hole near the olive tree. With no traditional kafan, she wrapped Ibrahim’s body in the window curtain – a domestic fabric transformed into a shroud. Gently, painstakingly, she rolled him into the earth. “It took me two hours of exhaustion. But God gave me strength.” 

She covered him with a zinc sheet, then wood, then soil. Alone, she recited Ayat al-Kursi and Surah Yasin, Quranic chapters for the dead, her tears falling silently onto the fresh earth. Exhausted beyond measure, she returned to the remnants of her home, bathed, and slept. 

But war grants no peace, even for the dead. Two weeks later, driven by a dreadful suspicion after hearing drone strikes and gunfire near the garden, Aziza returned. The grave had been violated. Bullets had pierced the zinc sheet, exposing Ibrahim’s head. “My heart broke,” she said. The image she shared is harrowing: “I picked up his head, it felt as light as a loaf of bread.” With renewed resolve, she dug deeper, added new zinc and wood, and reburied her husband. “I didn’t feel fear or hesitation, just pain, and patience.” 

The Walk: From Rubble to Checkpoint 

With her water gone, Aziza knew she had to leave. Carrying a white flag on a stick and two small bags, she walked towards an Israeli checkpoint. Soldiers threw her a leaking water bottle. A tank approached. They ordered her to empty her bags – medicine and clothes. Then, humiliation: they demanded to take her photo and ordered her to remove her hijab. “I refused,” she stated. Twenty guns pointed at her. “If you don’t remove it, we’ll kill you.” Broken, she complied. 

They made her walk, then placed her in a jeep. An Arabic-speaking soldier questioned her. Why hadn’t her husband left? “He refused, and I couldn’t leave him,” she answered simply. Abandoned near an area called Marj, she wandered lost for four hours before finding an aid post. Told to head north, she eventually reached a displacement camp and, through the kindness of strangers who recognized her family name, was reunited with her children near Khan Younis. 

The Unspoken Truth in Aziza’s Hands 

Aziza Qishta’s story is Gaza distilled. It holds the staggering civilian toll – nearly 4,000 killed since March 2025, over 54,000 since October 2023. It reveals the suffocating reality of siege: the trapped, the starving, the abandoned. It lays bare the indignities inflicted upon a grieving widow. 

But above all, Aziza’s hands tell another truth. Hands that carried her dying husband for hours. Hands that dug a grave and wrapped a body in a curtain. Hands that tenderly reburied a loved one disrespected by war. These hands speak of a love so profound it chose certain peril over separation, and a courage so quiet it performed sacred rites amidst desecration. 

Her solitary vigil in the garden is an act of monumental defiance – not against armies, but against the very dehumanization war seeks to impose. In wrapping Ibrahim in a curtain and laying him to rest with whispered prayers, Aziza Qishta reclaimed a fragment of dignity, not just for her husband, but for every life ground down by the relentless machinery of conflict. Her love, enduring until the very last shovel of earth, is the starkest indictment of the war that sought to erase it.