The voice on the other end of the line was small and faint; a six-year-old’s voice, crackling on a mobile phone from Gaza.
“The tank is next to me. It’s moving.”
Sitting in the emergency call-centre of the Palestinian Red Crescent, Rana tried to keep her own voice calm.
“Is it very close?”
“Very, very,” the small voice replied. “Will you come and get me? I’m so scared.”
There was nothing Rana could do except keep the conversation going.
Six-year-old Hind Rajab was trapped under fire in Gaza City and begging for help, hiding inside her uncle’s car, surrounded by the bodies of her relatives.
Rana’s voice was her only fragile link with a familiar world.
Hind had set off from her home in Gaza City earlier that day with her uncle, aunt and five cousins.
It was Monday 29 January. That morning, the Israeli army had told people to evacuate areas in the west of the city and move south along the coast road.
Hind’s mother, Wissam, remembers there was intense shelling in their area. “We were terrified, and we wanted to escape,” she said. “We were fleeing from place to place, to avoid the air strikes.”
The family decided to head for the Ahli Hospital to the east of the city, hoping it would be a safer place to shelter.