Appeal to help Gazan mother and girl (7) who saw family shot dead

A teacher in a Dublin school is making a desperate appeal for help for a young mother from Gaza, who arrived here with her daughter after seeing her husband and her other daughter shot dead by the Israel Defence Forces while they were trying to flee.

Halla Al Saqqa (33) arrived in Dublin in February with her seven-year-old daughter Chahd, after a harrowing four-month journey, during which her daughter Rahaf (5) was shot in the head in the back seat of their car. Her husband Mohammed was then shot dead when he stopped and got out of the car to attend to his stricken daughter.

Halla had to abandon Rahaf’s body in a building when she bled to death, and had to leave Mohammed’s body where he lay, to save herself and Chahd.

Teacher Sarah Costello, whose husband is Palestinian, met Halla and Chahd when they came to her school, Sallynoggin Killiney Educate Together National School. She was moved to start a fundraising campaign.

“Being married to a Palestinian, I felt intrinsically motivated to try to provide the best supports for both Halla and her daughter,” Ms Costello said.

“As a small school, we are in a unique position to really get to know these brave and beautiful individuals. We feel extremely fortunate and blessed to know them both. In an effort to further stabilise Halla and her daughter’s future, I started a GoFundMe campaign for them.”

Her plea has resulted in more than €7,000 being raised so far.

“We had a really lovely life before the war,” Halla said. “I was working as a project co-ordinator in an NGO in the field of education. And my husband was working as a civil engineer at the Bank of Palestine. And I had two girls.”

Everything changed with the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, and the subsequent war. In the following weeks, Halla and her family moved three times within Gaza City to seek shelter in relatives’ homes, until, on November 12, the house they were in was struck by a tank shell.

They decided to head south in search of safety. “We put two [white flags] in the car, from the windows of the car,” Halla said. “And then we went to the street which was announced to be safe and they will not kill people there. And we just reached there and they started shooting us.

“I turned to see my daughter in the back. And I saw Chahd at first, she was good, and I turned to see Rahaf. And I saw her bleeding. The shots were in my daughter’s head. And so immediately my husband went out of the car to take Chahd out. So I jumped to the back seat to cover her [Rahaf’s] head. She was still breathing. And when my husband went out of the car, they shot him. And he was holding Chahd, still holding her.” They sought safety in a nearby house, where Rahaf lay bleeding for two hours before she died.

Halla and Chahd eventually escaped into Egypt. Now living with a host family in Bray, Halla speaks positively about the help she has received in Ireland, and while her daughter “has a lot of downs, especially at sleeping time, when she remembers her sister and her father”, she has also made a lot of friends.

You can donate at gofundme.com/f/urgent-help-for-hala-shahd-gazansin-ireland