“Even at the edge of death, we are steadfast.”
In this episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo brings us the testimony of Iman Kaed Mohammad Ragheb Badra—a mother from Jabalia Al-Balad, displaced “more than eight times, maybe ten,” now living in a tent at Ansar Camp that she calls “a cage, like a chicken cage.”
Each flight took more from her. The last took everything:
“I didn’t get anything out. Not even a needle. I left with only the clothes I was wearing.”
When her house collapsed on her and her daughters, her youngest fainted with wounds to her face and head; Iman bled from her teeth beneath the rubble, alone. Ambulances could not get through. Her brother-in-law arrived “at the last breath.” Neighbours carried her out; at the mosque door she lost consciousness, and strangers pressed on her chest until she breathed again. “God granted me a new life,” she says.
That new life began with her deepest loss. At dawn, gas came while the family slept. “We woke up to darkness and smoke.” Her son—a boy who came after eight years of waiting and three daughters—suffocated in her arms.
“We tried to give him air, but it was useless. He died innocent. He had nothing to do with any of this.”
She had carried him through a famine pregnancy: “No apples. No bananas. No meat.” In those months she watched children eat bread from garbage, and her own daughter eat from the ground.
Now seven months pregnant again, Iman measures life in labours: her husband’s day is water and firewood; her daughters—three, four, seven—queue at water lines from 6 a.m. “Children here are no longer children,” she says. “Spinal injuries from carrying water.” One daughter prays simply:
“Oh God, take us so we can rest.”
Her Jabalia home is “rubble and sand”; she refuses to go and see it. Her husband went looking for clothes and returned with nothing—not even slippers for the girls. And so her appeal is precise, unadorned: “I don’t want charity, I need income. I am pregnant. I need nutrition. I need meat.”
In the studio, journalism student Easha Khawaja joins Sakina to sit with Iman’s testimony—and with what it means for her generation to inherit both the rubble and the refusal: to record, to witness, to carry the story forward.
Iman’s final message is not a plea but a vow:
“Despite hardship, despite loss, despite destruction, no matter what happens, until my last breath, we remain steadfast.”
In Iman’s hands—pinning laundry to a line strung through the bones of her collapsed home—resistance is motherhood continued under fire: grief, pregnancy and praise held in the same breath. And as long as she keeps the flame alive beneath her blackened kettle, steadfast “even at the edge of death,” the world cannot say it did not know.
