Tahrir Husni al-Arian, nine-months pregnant, could see pieces of her flesh falling to the ground as an Israeli combat dog savaged her thigh.
The Palestinian mother of three was at home with her husband and children in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip when the Israeli military invaded al-Manara, their neighbourhood. It was 24 October 2024.
The dog attack, which lasted about 10 minutes, left Arian in excruciating pain and caused complications that would last for months, ultimately leading to the loss of her newborn.
Since then, the 34-year-old has been unable to return to her own home, grappling with deep trauma.
In Khan Younis, she shared her harrowing account with Middle East Eye.
The story began when her family returned to their home after numerous displacements since the war began last year.
The area seemed safe, with no Israeli forces in sight, but that peace was shattered at around 8pm when the bombardment began.
‘They suddenly started shelling the area with missiles, and flares lit up the sky,’ Arian told MEE.
Unable to leave the building, Arian and her family took refuge in her brother-in-law’s apartment on the lower floor. Nearby homes were destroyed in the bombardment, including the home of the al-Farra family, and many neighbours lost their lives.
‘We couldn’t do anything. We were trapped,’ she recalls.
Arian, along with her husband, children, her pregnant sister, and brother-in-law, huddled together in the bathroom, keeping the lights off out of fear of being discovered or targeted.
‘We were scared to turn on any lights, thinking the drones would target us,’ she explained.
But then coming up the stairs they heard footsteps and voices.
Arian asked her husband what the sound was.
‘It’s the army,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t a regular dog’
But when the house suddenly lit up, they realised it wasn’t soldiers, but a dog, with a light and a camera on its head, entering each room in the house.
‘It came straight towards us in the bathroom,’ Arian said.
As the dog charged towards them, the family tried to slam the door shut, but it burst through. ‘It wasn’t a regular dog. It was huge, like a lion, all black,’ she recalled.
The dog broke through the door and attacked her 17-year-old sister, who was seven-months pregnant.
‘It tore her prayer dress, but thankfully, it left quickly.’ But then, the dog came back.
‘I didn’t see it at first, but then I felt it sinking its teeth into my right thigh, clamping down while scratching me with its claws,’ Arian continued.
‘My husband and the others tried to pull it off, but they couldn’t. It dragged me down the corridor, and I could feel pieces of my flesh falling as it bit into me.’
Israeli soldiers, who had been outside the bathroom, intervened. It took four soldiers to stop the dog.
‘I didn’t realize what happened afterward, but my husband told me,’ she said.
‘The first soldier tried to pry the dog’s teeth off me but couldn’t. The second and third soldiers couldn’t either,’ she continued. ‘Finally, the fourth soldier succeeded by patting its head, and the dog let go of me. It left the bathroom and just sat on the couch in the living room.’
Since the start of the Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip in late October 2023, the release of combat dog attacks on civilians has become common, with the Israeli military systematically deploying them to search buildings using cameras.
In December, Tel Aviv University shared a video on social media revealing the establishment of an ‘engineering war room’ on its campus to support Israeli military operations.
The facility has been developing technologies for the army, including a live-streaming system for dog-mounted cameras used by canine units linked to deadly attacks on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
The video highlighted the university’s collaboration with hundreds of academics and students serving as reservists in the Israeli military.
In July, MEE reported the death of a Palestinian with Down syndrome who was attacked by an Israeli combat dog in Gaza City and left to die by Israeli soldiers.
‘Paralysed with fear’
After the attack, the soldiers turned Arian’s apartment into a military base. They brought in her neighbours, separated the men from the women, and interrogated them. Some of the men, including Arian’s husband, were detained.
‘I was still lying on the bathroom floor, unable to move my injured leg and frozen with shock and fear. A soldier who spoke Arabic saw me and ordered me to get up,’ she Arian told MEE.
With the help of her neighbour, the pregnant Palestinian woman managed to stand and make her way to the couch outside.
The soldier returned and pointed at her belly, asking, ‘What is this?’ Arian answered, ‘Pregnancy.’
The soldier seemed confused and asked, ‘What does that mean?’ She replied, ‘A baby.’ He asked again, ‘What baby?’ Arian then lifted her prayer dress to show him her belly.
As Arian’s condition worsened, the soldiers did little to help. One poured water onto her wound and applied a pressure bandage, though she believed it was just an attempt to cover up what had happened.
Before they left, at around 2:30am the soldiers warned them to not tell anyone what had happened.
When the army withdrew, multiple ambulances arrived to evacuate the dead and wounded, but Arian refused to leave.
‘I was paralysed with fear, terrified of leaving the house. I was scared they’d bomb us while we were outside,’ she said. She waited until the last ambulance arrived and left with it just before dawn.
At the badly damaged Nasser hospital, doctors gave her an anti-toxin injection and stitched up her wound, which was about 15 centimetres wide. The doctor warned her that due to the injury, she might not be able to give birth naturally and would need a caesarean section the following week.
Just a month earlier, during a routine prenatal check-up, Arian had been told that her baby was suffering from deformities in its lower limbs. The doctors attributed this to the extreme stress, fear, and harsh conditions Arian had endured because of the war – running for her life, repeated displacement and severe malnutrition throughout her pregnancy.
Despite the grim news, they told her there was a 70 percent chance the baby would survive, though he would need to be placed in an incubator and would require physical therapy to walk normally.
‘I lost my baby’
About a week after the incident, Arian gave birth to a baby boy at around 7:30pm. They named him Ibrahim, and he was placed in an incubator.
‘The doctors told me that the surgery had been extremely difficult and that my son’s condition was critical,’ she said.
‘They told us that if there was any chance for him to survive, it was minimal because of the infection and the wound on my thigh.’
One of the nurses shared that during the surgery, a pungent smell emanated from Arian’s thigh due to the infection. After completing the caesarean, they waited a few hours before taking her for another surgery on her leg.
‘I could feel them reopening the wound and cleaning it. The smell from the wound and the electric devices they used was unbearable. It felt like I was suffocating, so I asked the nurse to open the window,’ she said.
After two surgeries, all the while hearing the distant sound of Israeli bombardments, Arian was allowed to rest.
‘I was exhausted and in unimaginable pain, but strangely, I was glad to stay in the hospital. I wished I could stay there and never go back to Gaza.
‘I didn’t want to go anywhere in Gaza, I just wanted to leave, to go abroad. I was consumed by fear that they might come back.’
In the morning, the nurses delivered the devastating news: her baby had passed away in the incubator.
‘There was a chance he could live, but the dog attack destroyed it. I lost my baby, and that was it. But what doesn’t end is my fear – that the military marked me and will come after me,’ she said.
‘It’s only recently that I’ve found the courage to speak about this. For two months, whenever family members asked me what happened, I’d tell them, ‘Don’t talk about it, don’t bring it up, please, I’m terrified.’’
To this day, Arian still cannot walk properly. Doctors have said her wound will take around eight months to fully heal.
‘I still feel severe pain and can barely walk,’ she explained. ‘The doctors said the wound is very deep. Even if it looks like it’s healing on the surface, the tissues inside will take months to recover.’
Mentally, Arian struggles with the trauma. She still asks family members to accompany her to the toilet. She sleeps with the lights on.
Her family reassures her, tells her they are with her. But she tells them: ‘You were with me when the dog attacked, and you couldn’t stop it.’
‘I’ve lost trust in everyone.’
If this 1948 Jewish self-rule experiment were instead located in the US state of Indiana, she would be at war with Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois.