During the 2014 war in Gaza, Nevine Barakat lost her husband and saw three of her five children wounded in an Israeli bombardment of a school.
Today, she hopes the International Criminal Court (ICC) will finally bring them justice.
When the court ruled last week that it had jurisdiction in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, opening the way for a war crimes investigation, Barakat immediately felt “happy and full of hope”.
“It was as if the world was beginning to understand that Israeli injustice had to be ended,” she said, fighting back tears. In the summer of 2014, Israel launched what it called Operation Protective Edge with the stated aim of stopping rocket fire into its territory by fighters of Hamas.
The 50-day war in the Palestinian enclave was the third between the Jewish state and Hamas, after those of 2008 and 2012.
Around 2,250 Palestinians were killed in the 2014 fighting, mostly civilians, and 74 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
On July 30, 2014, Barakat and her family, like hundreds of others, were sheltering in a school run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip.
Their homes had been destroyed in previous Israeli attacks. A UN report said in the hours before dawn the school was hit by an Israeli artillery barrage.
“I counted seven shells before I passed out,” said Barakat, who suffered severe back injuries that left her paralysed in her lower limbs.
She said she only recovered consciousness when she heard her son cry out that his father was dead. Her injured daughter Samar, now 18, remembers how she tried to dodge the shells. “But they were falling in front of and behind us,” 
she said.