The Wound as Witness

Zeinab Mestrah arrives at the studio with her fiancé. Throughout the session, he stood behind the camera, offering gentle words of encouragement and anticipating her needs before she can voice them. “It’s not about money or beauty,” she says with certainty. “Love is proven through actions.” She turns toward him, smiles, and laughs.

Love remained at the center of the conversation throughout the interview, held weeks before their wedding. “I miss her company whenever we’re apart. And when I return, I make sure to bring her favorite sweets and candies,” the groom says, reaffirming an answer unchanged since their first meeting: “The most beautiful things about her are her eyes and her smile.”

“His devoted attention makes me feel like a cherished daughter, not a wife. I find safety in his tenderness.”

Zeinab grew up and studied in Dahieh. At 19, she met her now-fiancé, and love blossomed between them despite social, economic, and health challenges. She worked in interior design for several years, and her most cherished project was her own marital home in the southern town of Qabrikha. “I took care of every detail,” Zeinab recounts, that memory now fractured. “I chose the paint for the walls, the bedroom furniture, the furnishings for every room.” 

Her dream was violently interrupted. An enemy drone targeted the ground floor of the building after three resistance fighters launched a salvo of rockets from the village square, then sought refuge in nearby homes.

On the morning of the massacre, Zeinab had planned a long day of work outside the house, but “divine providence,” as she calls it, led her to begin her tasks from home, where a friend had come to visit.

“I stood up to look for the charger in the next room,” she says. “Then a loud buzzing sound filled the air, like a bomb about to detonate. I grabbed the pager and saw the message on the screen: ‘ERROR’ and a skull. I got scared and tried to back away, but it exploded, and I fell to the ground.”

Her mother, friend, and brother rushed to her, but in the blur, it felt much longer, as if the wait stretched into hours and days. Zeinab cried out to her friend, struggling to explain that it was the pager, not the charger, that had exploded. “I was screaming inside,” she says, “but they couldn’t hear me.” 

Her friend quickly understood what had happened and took her to al-Rassoul al-Aazam Hospital, where Zeinab was the third pager casualty through the doors. Her friend was terrified by the sight of the wounded lying on makeshift bedding in the corridors.

Several hours later, the doctor finally emerged from the operating room. He told the family there was a chance to save one of Zeinab's eye. Overwhelmed by the news, her mother fainted; until then, she had believed that only Zeinab’s fingertips were injured. “She felt better,” Zeinab says, “when she realized we weren’t alone, that thousands of families shared this pain.”

Her fiancé arrived at the hospital at dawn. “I sensed his presence before he could speak, so I called out to him.” He leaned close and whispered, “I always told you that you were special, and now God has confirmed it. God has chosen you to be the wounded one among us. Let’s continue this life together and have a son who will avenge your wounds.”

His commitment was unshakable. When her family told him they would understand if he reconsidered his decision to marry her, he reacted angrily and refused to entertain the conversation. “Whenever my mother was asked about my condition, she would respond, ‘Her lover is half her cure,’” Zeinab says. 

Confined to her hospital bed and unable to see, Zeinab sensed that she had lost her left eye. She asked her little brother, who kept vigil by her bed, kissing her hand, “Have I lost my sight?” He stayed silent. “He cried quietly for a long time,” she says. “I let him grieve, then reminded him we must thank God for everything.” 

She heard her brother and fiancé arguing outside her room, each insisting that he should be the one to donate an eye. 

She later asked her fiancé the same question, and he denied it. But not long after, she heard her brother and fiancé arguing outside her room, each insisting that he should be the one to donate an eye. Their voices rose until a doctor intervened and explained that what they were proposing was medically impossible and, so, their argument futile.

She recalls falling ill in mid-August 2024 and spending three weeks in that same hospital. Back then, the nurses had grown accustomed to her screams and constant pleas for painkillers. After the massacre, however, she rarely cried out. When a nurse noticed the change and asked her why, Zeinab answered: “This pain is different.”

A few days later, her father arrived and told her to prepare to leave immediately for Iran. “I was suddenly overcome with sadness,” she says. “I complained to God about being separated from my country and family when I needed them most.” Her mother accompanied her during the 10 weeks she spent there for treatment. On the fifth day, as her mother was helping her to the bathroom, Zeinab caught a fleeting glimpse of her. “‘Mom!’ I cried out. ‘I see you! I see you!’ I began wiping her face with my hands and weeping.”

It was difficult for Zeinab to follow the news, especially because her family in Lebanon was shielding her from what was happening. Her brother arrived in Tehran just as news of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s martyrdom broke. He lingered outside her room, reluctant to enter because she had just come out of major surgery. “Then I heard screams and a wave of collective crying,” she says. “I asked one of the translators what was happening, and he said that the brother of one of the wounded had been martyred.”

“And who is this martyr that everyone is crying for?” Zeinab asks, before joining them in grief.

Just days before his assassination, she had joked with her family: “Now, I have an excuse to meet the Sayyed in person.” 

During the war, her severe injuries did not stop her from staying in touch with her displaced and scattered family. “The realization that the entire country was under Israeli fire terrified me. Nowhere was safe anymore,” she says. “I kept insisting that I wanted to return, preferring to die with my family than lose them.”

She remembers her sorrow for another wounded man and his fiancée when doctors told them there was no hope of restoring his sight. Out of respect for the suffering around her, she learned to temper her happiness at her own progress. She discovered that her fingertips had been amputated by chance, while a nurse was changing her bandages. “A strange joy washed over me — perhaps because I wanted my body to bear witness with me,” she admits. “Reconstructive surgery may erase the massacre from my face, but my hands will remain a lasting sign of God’s love.”

She is considering returning to school to pursue a field of study suited to her new physical reality. She feels drawn to religious studies and psychology. “I want to have children and raise them on the path of resistance,” she says. “I may not be able to cut their nails or help them bathe, but I will not need to explain our struggle against the occupation. They will understand it the moment they see my wounds.”

She describes running her hand over her face one day, feeling the changes left by her injuries, and thinking to herself: “What are my wounds compared to those of the people of Gaza, who are living through a genocide?”

Zeinab had been active in the campaigns to boycott Israel and regularly posted about Gaza and the resistance on social media. On the morning of October 7, 2023, she was jolted awake by the sound of celebratory gunfire from Burj al-Barajneh camp and her mother’s shouts filling the house: “Get up and look at Palestine!”

During the battle on the Support Front, she would sometimes tease her mother — the same mother who had instilled in her a love for the resistance since childhood: “Aren’t you ashamed that, after all these years, not one of your three sons has become a martyr for the resistance? How will you face God, mother?” Then she would laugh.