A 7-year-old girl is the lone serious casualty of Iran’s barrage

The hospital waiting room was quiet Sunday: There was no crowd of relatives, no flood of patients. Israel’s air defenses had just fended off a large-scale Iranian attack, with only one serious casualty recorded.

But while Israel suffered little in the way of significant damage overnight, one family was dealt a devastating blow. Amina al-Hasoni, 7, was clinging to life — the sole serious casualty of the Iranian barrage. And were it not for systemic inequities in Israel, her relatives said, maybe she too could have been spared.

There are roughly 300,000 Arab Bedouins in the Negev desert. About one-quarter of them live in villages that are not recognized by Israeli officials. Those communities have long suffered from a lack of planning and basic services. And few have access to bomb shelters, despite repeated requests to the state.

The Hasoni family lives in one such community, sharing a hilltop in the Negev village of al-Fur’ah with a plot of disconnected houses. When rocket warning sirens went off Saturday night, Amina’s uncle Ismail said there was nowhere to go.

Booms overhead signaled air defenses intercepting missiles before there was a big explosion. Then he heard a woman screaming — his sister, he said.

Ismail, 38, found his sister outside her house holding Amina.

A missile fragment ripped through the home’s thin metal roof, shearing a hole with sharp metallic edges. It made impact just in front of the door — which is where Amina was knocked unconscious.

“I think it hit her while she was running away,” Ismail said.

He said he took the injured Amina from his sister and lifted the girl into his own arms. Ismail then tracked down a car that raced her toward the hospital, more than 40 minutes away.

“It’s difficult,” he said Sunday afternoon, his jeans and boots still spattered with blood. Not far from where he sat, a pink Minnie Mouse blanket and a small black-and-white girl’s dress hung on a family clothesline.

“We could have built shelters here,” Ismail added.

He dismissed any suggestions that what happened to Amina was bad luck.

“It’s part of a policy,” he said. “We can’t do anything.”

The Hasoni home is not far from a military base, Nevatim, that was reportedly a target of the Iranian assault and that Israeli officials said was lightly damaged.

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