“It’s very stressful. You don’t feel like working, you don’t feel like doing anything but to check on the news and see what’s happening to your people," said Sam Abunemeh.
The TV in his Las Colinas living room has been on constantly since violence erupted in Gaza over the weekend.
“I’m sleeping on news, I’m waking up on news, even, you know, in the middle of the night I wake up with half an eye, check on the news, see what’s happening," he said.
Then, a call from his dad, in Houston, Thursday morning.
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“[He was] tearing up, ‘We’ve lost some family members, they’re under the rubble," Abunemeh recalled.
His family found a video on Instagram the same day from a journalist on the ground, showing his cousin-- a child-- being rescued from the rubble.
“He’s saying, ‘We were on the top floor reading Quran, praying—just praying because all the sounds that’s been happening and all of a sudden, he heard a boom,'" Abunemeh said, translating what his cousin was saying.
The child is shown on a stretcher in the video.
"...And then he saw people lifting up the rubble, which means there’s time that passed without him realizing just what happened, and he’s saying that family members and neighbors started lifting up the rubble," Abunemeh explained.
Abunemeh said the child lived with multiple family members in the same house-- more than a dozen people, who were still unaccounted for.
“He started crying and saying, ‘Where’s who was with me?’" Abunemeh said.
“What did this kid do to the world? What did he do to the world? Nothing. He did nothing.” he added.
Hamza Noufal, who lives in Allen, said Israel's air strikes have displaced his family twice, already.
“They’re basically bombing anywhere, everywhere. People are just living in the streets," Noufal said.
He said his uncle goes to sleep not knowing if he'll wake up again.
“’Every night, I hug my children’-- he’s got three daughters-- and he doesn’t wait for the morning," Noufal said.
Noufal and Abunemeh say they're speaking up for their loved ones and all the innocent people in Gaza.
“We’re humans. I have hands. We’re humans, Palestinians are humans," Abunemeh said.
Abunemeh said that as civil engineers, he and his dad love building this country, and they hope the U.S. government can do more to help their people, with aid like food, water, medicine and power.
“We want to keep benefitting the country and that’s what we’re doing but we want the country to also pay attention to our people," he said.
He said they just want peace.
“They don’t want that life. They want a different life," Abunemeh said. “They deserve to have a… beautiful upbringing that’s not full of death and blood and losing family members.”
Minutes after his interview with NBC 5, Abunemeh found out the rest of his family inside that bombed building were dead.
Now, while praying for loved ones who are still struggling to survive, he grieves the loss of multiple family generations, wiped out in a moment.
“They live together, they stay together, they eat together, they sleep together and… (cut)… they’re under the rubble together, unfortunately," he said.
