Three Palestinian women were preparing for Eid. Then death fell from the sky

They had come to to do their hair for the Eid holiday. 

Twelve young women filled the hair salon on Wednesday night, after Iftar, a small prefabricated metal structure on the edge of Beit Awa, a village in the Hebron district in the occupied West Bank. Around several kilometers away from Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, a few kilometers west of the Green Line.

Eid al Fitr was less than 48 hours away. 

Amal Subhi Abd al-Rahman Mutawi al-Masalma, 28, was six months into her pregnancy with with her first child.

Meis Ghazi Ammar al-Masalma, 35, had brought her two-year-old daughter with her that evening, the way she often did, because the salon was the kind of place where children were welcome, where coffee appeared without being asked for, where a neighbor's difficult day became everyone's shared concern. 

Sahira Rizq Ouda Atila al-Masalma, 33, had built the salon herself, not just the business, but the idea of it, the stubborn insistence on an independent life she had constructed alone after her divorce. 

At 9:30 p.m. a single explosion ended the lives, dreams, and hopes of the three women. Fragments from an Israeli interceptor missile, fired at an Iranian projectile passing above the West Bank, tore through the metal structure, according to the Israeli army’s statement. Eight others were wounded. Meis’ infant survived.

Hadil Masalma, Sahira's business partner and friend, was working with a customer when it happened. She recalled how one of the younger women had stepped outside after hearing sirens from the Israeli side, sounds they had learned to register as distant, belonging to someone else's emergency. 

The woman came back pale, eyes wide, screaming that something red was falling toward them. The others tried to calm her, to pull her back inside. Then the electricity cut, darkness came, and the sounds became strange and muffled.

“I don't know how I found the door,” Hadeel said. She stumbled out calling names, Sahira's name, and the names of the other women, until someone told her who had not made it out. “The world stopped at that moment,” she said at the funeral of her life-time friend bearing the injuries of the explosion on her face and nose. “The laughter, the warmth, all of it became an echo dissolving into nothing”.

Soma al-Omla, Sahira's cousin, described her as someone who had made herself into a pillar for everyone around her. Sahira had separated from her husband at 29, over her family's objections, and had refused to be defined by what others said about failure or shame. She had built the salon, supported her parents and siblings on her earnings, quietly, without announcing it. 

“Her story shouldn’t have ended in a farewell in this ugly death,” Soma said at her cousin’s funeral on Thursday. 

When the news reached Sahira's family, her mother collapsed and had to be sedated before she could be present at the burial. Her father stood at the newly-dug grave in silence. 

Soma said the siblings, who had long argued with Sahira about her choices, now stood asking themselves whether they had been enough of a support to her, or whether their insistence on their own certainties had left her to carry everything alone. 

“We will honour her,” Soma said, “by listening more, by holding more, and by bearing what we could not bear before because life can end in a second ”. 

Sajida al-Suwaiti, a Beit Awa resident who had known all three women, spoke at the school courtyard where the funeral prayers were held. The mosque could not hold the crowd that came from across the West Bank's towns and villages, as if the whole country, she said, was carrying a single coffin. 

She described each woman as she had known her. Amal, always steady, always present for grieving families in the village, her gentleness intact even as her own grief for the land accumulated around her. 

Mais, who wiped away a neighbour's tears without being asked, who set the Eid preparations in the house as ritual, the decorations, the lanterns, the small outfit already bought for her daughter to wear into the holiday. Sahira, who prepared Eid gifts for her family in silence, proud to have built something of her own. 

The mayor of Beit Awa, Yousef Al Sweiti, whose voice carried the weight of dust and smoke that had not left him since the morning, described the attack as “a fracture in the fabric of daily life”. 

The village had been close to the boundary for as long as anyone could remember, he said, but proximity had never meant safety, it meant exposure. “Today we buried our daughters,” he said. “The city that was preparing to celebrate is now wearing black”.

The attack on the salon was not an isolated incident, though it was the deadliest single event. Maj. Gen. Louay Irzikat, the West Bank police chief, said security forces had responded to 182 separate incidents involving falling debris and suspected unexploded ordnance scattered across the territory since the US-Israeli war on Iran started. 

Twenty-five homes had sustained structural damage. A young woman in Hebron city was killed by shrapnel while walking in the street. A boy died after falling from a rooftop while trying to see where the rockets were coming from. 

Irzikat described the response as coordinated across police, civil defence, Red Crescent, and bomb disposal units, cordoning sites, evacuating civilians, and conducting controlled disposal of unexploded materials. But he acknowledged the structural gap that emergency protocols cannot bridge: the West Bank has no early warning system of its own, no sirens, and almost no public shelters. The warning sounds Hadil and the other women heard that morning came from across the Green Line, not for them. 

“The absence of warning sirens and the shortage of shelters increases civilian vulnerability,” Irzikat said. Authorities had been sending text alerts through Palestinian telecommunications companies and issuing guidance through civil defense channels, but the guidance assumed people had time and infrastructure that, in many cases, they simply do not have. 

He called on international donors to fund early warning systems and emergency shelters for communities near the boundary, warning that without them, West Bank civilians will remain unintended casualties in a conflict they have no part in. 

The mayor made the same appeal. Beit Awa, he said, is a small example of what hundreds of villages are living through, communities that are neither combatants nor safe. “What we saw cannot be described in words," he said, "and cannot be described by anyone who did not live it”. 

As for the salon, the small metal structure where twelve women had gathered to prepare for a holiday, it is now a pile of rubble. 

Published in collaboration with Egab.