Gaza girl rescued alive from morgue after being declared dead

Twelve-year-old Raghad Al-Assar from Gaza spent eight hours inside a mortuary refrigerator after she was severely wounded and mistakenly pronounced dead following an Israeli bombardment on her home in Nuseirat.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Raghad said she was sitting inside her home when Israeli occupation aircraft and drones hovered overhead. Two of her sisters were killed in the strike, while other family members were critically injured.

She was taken to the hospital, where she was wrongly declared dead and transferred to the mortuary while she was unconscious. She was discovered alive only when a man searching for his own relative in the morgue noticed her fingers moving as she lay on the cold slab. Staff immediately moved her out of the mortuary.

“I was in a coma for two weeks, and when I woke up, my family told me that I had been placed in the morgue refrigerator,” Raghad said. “I was there for eight hours.”

Raghad shared that her elder sister remains in critical condition due to severe injuries sustained in the Israeli assault. She is unable to see and suffers from burns, deep wounds, and internal complications.

Raghad’s father, who was not at home during the strike, rushed to the hospital after the incident to search for his family. He said he learned that five of his daughters were injured and two were martyred. He searched for Raghad under the rubble but could not find her.

Later, when he heard news about a girl found alive in a morgue, he hurried there and discovered his daughter in an unstable condition.

He said Raghad is deeply traumatized, adding that the ordeal has severely affected her mental health. “She faints while walking,” he shared.

Raghad, with tears in her eyes, shared her desperate need to avoid remembering the incident. She explained that whenever the topic arises, she immediately stops the conversation. "I don’t like to hear someone describe it, I don’t like to remember what I went through," she stated.

Raghad's family is now seeking medical treatment for their daughters abroad. Furthermore, Raghad yearns to return to the normal life she had before the events involving Israel shattered it.