It was mid-afternoon on October 14 when Ayman Alsayed got the call. It was his brother, Diaa, on the phone from Gaza City, seven hours ahead of where Ayman was in the U.S. Diaa was OK, but there had been an airstrike on their family house in Jabalia. Some of their loved ones had been killed, including their mother, Zahia. Others had survived — and were now stranded in the remnants of the building.
“He told me about my brother: ‘He can’t move and he’s wounded,’” Ayman recalled of Diaa’s desperate pleas for their injured brother Ashraf. “He told me, ‘Please, please — if you can do anything from America to help the family.’”
Ayman did not have many options.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “We know it’s impossible to find somebody to help from here. But we did our best.”
With each avenue he tried, Ayman kept coming up empty. Finally, there was a breakthrough: A friend put him in touch with the head of a D.C. nonprofit who had a contact at the White House. Ayman gave them the address and coordinates to the home.
“We sent this so they can pass it to the Israelis to let the ambulance take the people,” Ayman said.
In Gaza, daylight was fast approaching. Diaa Alsayed was still in touch with his surviving family in Jabalia. Some of the stranded relatives had been bleeding for hours. Around 7:30 a.m., a local doctor finally managed to get into their house and take the injured children away. The doctor said he would return to help the surviving adults get out.
“Did you give them the coordinates?? They just hit the house again!”
About 15 minutes later, Diaa got devastating news. The doctor and most of the children had been killed. And the house had been attacked again. Only one of his brothers and his nephew had survived.
The news of the attack quickly made its way around the globe to Ayman Alsayed and his wife Rachel. On a group chat with the nonprofit official who had passed their family’s location to the White House, Rachel wrote, “Did you give them the coordinates?? They just hit the house again!”
Attempts to save civilians in Gaza routinely end with those very civilians being targeted. Israel has repeatedly attacked emergency and aid workers whose locations were given to its military as part of requests for safe passage. It’s a constant reminder to Palestinians that no safety exists for them.
The name of Hind Rajab, a 6-year old girl, became a rallying cry for global opposition to the war after audio of her pleas for help went viral. The Red Crescent ambulance that had received Israeli approval to rescue her was attacked just as it reached her. In April, an airstrike killed seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen despite, the organization said, coordination for their car travel with the Israeli military.
Ensuring safe passage is common in war, but in Israel’s campaign against Gaza it has proven to be a risk, not a guarantee of security. In May, Human Rights Watch said that the attack on the World Central Kitchen workers was not an isolated incident; it was one of at least eight strikes where aid groups and the United Nations “had communicated with Israeli authorities the GPS coordinates of an aid convoy or premises and yet Israeli forces attacked the convoy or shelter without any warning.”
Israel “knew that they could do all of this without any serious pressure by the White House.”
In addition, the Israeli military has struck ambulances and killed emergency workers throughout the war. This was the lethal combination the Alsayed brothers were up against as they tried to save their family. Assistance from the White House seemed extraordinary, but it wouldn’t end up helping at all. According to Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the second attack, despite the White House’s involvement, speaks to Washington’s inability to deal with allegations of civilian harm by the Israeli military.
“They knew that they could do all of this without any serious pressure by the White House,” Awad told The Intercept. “The White House — by this very action that they gave the information to the Israelis, they’re showing that they’re incompetent. They don’t have the resolve to hold Israel to account.”
For Ayman Alsayed, in the U.S., the idea that his attempts to help his loved ones ended this way has left him with a profound guilt.
“It’s difficult to express how I felt,” Ayman said. “This is what I believe: that I hurt my family, not helped them, by giving all this information to the embassy who passed the information to the Israelis. And instead of bringing safe passage for the ambulance to come, they attacked the house again using the coordinates we gave them.”
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Months before the October attack that nearly wiped out what remained of his family, Diaa Alsayed already knew loss. His wife and six of his children had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Jabalia.
On the night of October 14, the first airstrike on his family home, Diaa was in Gaza City with his only surviving child, his daughter Tala, when he received the call around 9 p.m. from his sister-in-law Sumaya.
“‘Help me, help me!’” she had said, Diaa told The Intercept. “‘Call an ambulance! Call somebody! Two of my children have been martyred.’” She told Diaa that his mother had been killed and that the surviving family needed urgent help.
At the time, the Israeli military was about 10 days into its ongoing siege of northern Gaza. The onslaught had hit the Jabalia refugee camp particularly hard. U.N. officials were already warning of horrific conditions, with tens of thousands of people cut off from aid and countless civilians killed and wounded. Long before the siege, the capacity of hospitals and emergency systems had been decimated, but now access to care had become even more daunting.
“I tried calling for help, but the ambulance service said it was out of their hands,” Diaa said. “They couldn’t enter the area because it was too dangerous, the ambulances were being targeted.”
Sumaya, Diaa and Ayman Alsayed’s sister-in-law, sought help from emergency workers herself. In a recording of a call from that night, she explained to the dispatcher that she and the other survivors couldn’t get out of the house. No one had been able to come help them.
“Be careful, the army is not far from you,” Fares Afana, the emergency worker, told her. “Until now, we cannot reach you. And this is — I swear to God — wrecking our hearts.”
“Unfortunately the story of this family is among dozens of stories,” said Nebal Farsakh, a spokesperson for the Palestine Red Crescent Society. “From previous experiences when we had even coordinated access for the staff, many times the ambulance was targeted despite being part of coordinated missions.”
Meanwhile, Diaa was still looking for a way to save his family. He turned to journalists.
“I wanted to draw attention to the unfolding tragedy,” he said, “and enable coordination with organizations like the Red Cross or emergency services.”
He called Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Jabalia, Anas al-Sharif. In a video of the call with al-Sharif posted to Instagram, Diaa explains that his relatives were killed or injured, and no ambulances could get to the survivors.
“The rescue teams also contacted me just now,” al-Sharif responds to Diaa. “They can’t move because of the shelling.”
“In the U.S., Ayman Alsayed and his wife Rachel were trying to figure out what to do. Getting an ambulance to their family in Jabalia would require approval from Israeli authorities. The Alsayeds tried calling the Red Crescent, but they confirmed what Diaa had been told: Red Crescent ambulances couldn’t get past the Israeli military.
Then, as American citizens, Ayman and Rachel turned to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, but it was already nighttime there. The only office open was an emergency duty desk — unlikely to have a direct line to the Israeli military.
With the clock ticking, they decided to ask friends if they knew anyone who could help. The outreach would eventually bring them to Sean Carroll, the director of the nonprofit Anera. Carroll, whose group provides food and medical aid in Gaza, quickly reached out to a contact at the White House, he said, and got an immediate reply.
“They were asking for coordinates,” Carroll told The Intercept. Working with the Alsayed family and his colleagues on the ground, Carroll provided the information to a National Security Council official. “We tried to provide coordinates, but also a description of where the house was. So the NSC passed those on.”
He also contacted the Israeli military’s office of Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, which administers Palestinian civilian life in the occupied territories, including emergency and medical logistics.
“` Carroll didn’t receive an immediate response from COGAT, but he wasn’t worried because he knew the White House was involved. The National Security Council and the embassy were in touch with COGAT, which reassured Carroll. The White House received information about the initial attack and multiple agencies, including the State Department, were working to assist. Information was relayed to Israeli authorities and the UN for further help.
Carroll’s contact at the White House informed him that the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem had passed on the information to the Israeli Southern Command. Ayman Alsayed, though skeptical, wanted to do whatever he could to help his family, despite the Biden administration’s support for Israel.
Hours after the attack, Diaa Alsayed was still in contact with trapped relatives in Gaza, experiencing fear and desperation. A family friend, Dr. Al-Najjar, tried to evacuate the wounded, but tragically, he and the children he was rescuing were targeted by the Israeli army. Mohammed, Ayman’s nephew, witnessed the attack but was saved by a neighbor.
After a series of tragic events, including the death of Dr. Al-Najjar and several family members, Diaa and Ayman were left devastated. The rescuers found the bodies of the Alsayed family members, including children, in the street. Injuries were extensive, and some family members did not survive the attack. In total, 12 members of the Alsayed family, including six children, were killed in the airstrike. Surviving the tragic attack were only Ashraf Alsayed, who is now paralyzed, and his son Mohammed. Ashraf’s other family members did not make it, including his 1-and-a-half-year-old daughter Amal, as shown in a heartbreaking photo from the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli military requested coordinates of the Alsayed family home to answer questions, which The Intercept did not provide due to the sensitivity of the story.
Fares Afana, an emergency worker, expressed regret in a video for not being able to act sooner to save lives during the attack.
Ashraf and Mohammed are currently receiving medical care in a Gaza hospital, but the state of the healthcare system and Israeli restrictions on supplies are hindering Ashraf’s recovery.
Diaa, Ashraf’s brother, is deeply concerned for Mohammed’s mental well-being, as he witnessed the loss of his family members in the attack.
Diaa is also struggling to get medical help for his daughter Tala, who was injured in a separate airstrike that took the lives of Diaa’s wife and other children.
Despite the ongoing challenges, the Alsayed family faces in Gaza, Ayman in the U.S. feels helpless and guilty for the situation, especially with the Biden administration’s support for Israel amidst allegations of genocide.
The pain of being so far away from his surviving family members weighs heavily on Ayman, who feels complicit in the tragedy due to paying taxes that support the conflict.
The Alsayed family’s story is a stark reminder of the devastating impact of war on innocent lives and the urgent need for peace and humanitarian aid in Gaza. Please rewrite this sentence.
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