Al-Fukhari, Gaza – For Rawaa Abu Mohsen, it is her sister Baraa’s life that she wants to be remembered, not how she died on October 30.

Baraa, 31, was killed along with her mother in an Israeli bombing.

“My mother was Baraa’s closest friend,” Rawaa recalled of the bond they shared.

Of course, she added, like any mother and daughter, they would argue about trivial things, but such things passed quickly.

For Rawaa, “Baraa was my sister, my companion and partner in my happiest memories. She always asked me to go to her house with my daughter so we could stay up and talk.”

Find your passion

In school, Baraa struggled with formal education, her sister recalled, preferring to express herself through the endless drawings that covered her textbooks and homework.

Nevertheless, she did well in school and eventually achieved the grades she needed to enter university and learn English.

At first she had hoped to work for an international organization, but in the end her creativity prevailed and she started her own business, designing and making tiny models that decorate the surface of cakes.

It was a talent that Baraa discovered almost by accident.

“She was browsing the internet,” Rawaa said when she came across the idea of ​​miniatures. Soon she began “working on them despite not having the necessary tools to produce quality products.”

For example, Baraa couldn’t find the paste she needed to make these miniatures, so she had to make them herself from common household ingredients and hand-paint them.

Baraa loved her work and felt creatively fulfilled. She soon met a man who she fell in love with and married.

To her delight, she was soon pregnant and welcomed her beloved daughter Tamara with open arms.

Tamara was Baraa’s world, Rawaa remembered. When they were together, they didn’t need the world, they lived an independent life, separate from everything that surrounded them.

Building a future only to have it stolen

But cracks soon began to appear in Baraa’s marriage and she moved back in with her parents, while also looking for ways to expand her business so that it would support her and Tamara and their future.

She managed to get funding from an NGO and when war broke out she started working on a diploma in project management.

“She was always thinking about what she could be like

strong

and continue to live their own lives,” Rawaa recalled. “She didn’t care about anything except her daughter.”

The day Baraa and her mother were killed is etched in Rawaa’s memory.

“We talked the night before,” she said. “She told me how Tamara [now seven months old] was afraid of the bombing and cried because of the noise.

“She asked me to bring my own children to the family home because the home and neighborhood were safer than ours.”

Ironically, the family home was bombed the next day.

“I never thought this would happen to my family,” Rawaa said, adding that she was told everyone was fine when the attack first occurred.

She later learned that both her sister and her mother were among those seriously injured.

Rawaa was able to visit her, but Baraa’s condition remained unstable.

“She woke up but didn’t eat anything. On her last day, she asked to eat bread, za’atar, oil, olives and cucumbers,” Rawaa recalls.

The last thing her sister asked for before she passed out for the last time was to see her daughter so she could breastfeed her.

Baraa died not long after, along with her mother.

Her last wish: to hold her child.