Gaza's 'girl of fire' Ward Jalal Sheikh Khalil emerges from the ashes, alone and lost

At dawn, during another Israeli airstrike on Gaza, a barefoot girl runs out of her classroom that's burning, her skin blistered, voice raw with terror. Her name is Ward Jalal Sheikh Khalil, six years old, and across the Palestinian territories she has become known as "the girl of fire."

On 26 May, Ward went to sleep with her family inside the Fahmi al-Jirjawi School in the Al-Daraj neighbourhood of Gaza City, one of hundreds of makeshift shelters where displaced families thought schools would offer sanctuary from the war.

But at daybreak, that refuge turned into an incinerator.

Her classroom had been struck in a pre-dawn Israeli raid that, within minutes, and killed about 33 Palestinians, including her mother, three sisters, and two brothers. Her father and another brother were critically wounded, according to the Gaza-based health ministry.

A viral video captured Ward as she stumbled out of the inferno, her face frozen in shock, her body charred, the sky behind her black with smoke.

"I was sleeping. I woke up in fire […] I screamed, but nobody heard. My hand was burning. I tried to run, but the fire was everywhere [...] then a man came and carried me out," Ward recalled to The New Arab.

During the incident, she doesn't remember her family's faces. She never got to say goodbye.

A school turned into a grave

The school in Al-Daraj had not been marked for evacuation by the Israeli military, and dozens of families were sleeping there. Basil Sheikh Khalil, Ward's uncle, told TNA that the family of his brother were reduced to "skeletons."

"Had the medics not told us these were their bodies, we wouldn't have known. There was no flesh left, only bones," he added, voice breaking with emotion.

The Civil Defence in Gaza described it as one of the most horrific scenes they have encountered. Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson of the civil defence, described to TNA that the rescue crews recovered body parts belonging to 12 individuals across four bags. "It was a massacre," he said.

Fares Afana, director of Gaza's emergency services and among the first responders, described what he found: "Three classrooms were engulfed. We heard children and women screaming inside. We couldn’t reach them. They burned alive."

In the hours following the attack, the Israeli army claimed that the school was used as a command centre by Palestinian factions. No evidence was presented.

Gaza's Government Media Office swiftly rejected the accusation, labelling the strike "a war crime and an act of collective punishment."

The school, it said, was sheltering families, not fighters. Since October 2023, over 240 UNRWA-run shelters and schools have been targeted by Israeli airstrikes, it explained.

Ward now sits amid the ruins of her world, not in a hospital bed, but in her uncle's home, without her parents or siblings.

"She doesn't eat. She doesn't sleep," her uncle said quietly. "She keeps asking about her mother. We don't know how to tell her she'll never see her again."

"She knows her mother and siblings were killed," he added, "but she still believes they will walk through the door any moment."

'Napalm girl of Gaza'

As images and videos of Ward spread online, many drew painful comparisons to another child of war: Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old "Napalm Girl" from Vietnam, photographed running naked and screaming after a US airstrike in 1972.

 That single image helped change the course of that war.

But unlike Phuc's photo, Ward's moment has not sparked a similar reckoning.

"Her video exposes humanity like no other moment since the war began," Reham Odeh, a Gaza-based Palestinian analyst, told TNA. "But it also reveals the depth of the international double standard. Phuc's photo shook governments. Ward's video hasn't even moved them."

She added that this indifference speaks to a broader erosion of accountability, especially when it comes to Israeli actions in Gaza.

"Both girls symbolise burned innocence, but Phuc's image surfaced when global opinion was already shifting, and Vietnam had the backing of powerful allies," Ahmad Rafiq Awad, a Ramallah-based Palestinian political analyst, told TNA.

"Today, Palestine stands alone. No superpower is defending Palestinian rights. Western public opinion has grown numb, and the media that once held governments to account is now either bombed into silence or complicit through its absence," he added.

Awad stressed that while the image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc helped galvanise anti-war movements and push policymakers toward ending US involvement in Vietnam, but no comparable pressure exists today.

"There is no political cost for ignoring Gaza. Governments issue statements, not actions. The institutions meant to uphold international law are paralysed or politicised," he grimly remarked.

"Ward's image confronts the world with its moral failure, but there is no one to listen, no interest in justice," he said.

For Palestinians like Ward, the burden of global apathy is not theoretical. Her survival may have become a symbol, but her grief remains unbearably real.