A father has lost his four-day-old twins, his wife and mother-in-law in an Israeli airstrike as he went to get the twins’ birth certificates.
Mohammed Abu al Qumsan’s newborn twins – a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel – were born over the weekend and were just four days old when they were killed in the strike on their home near the central city of Deir al-Balah.
His wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth by Cesarean section and announced the twins’ arrival on Facebook. She and her mother, Abu al Qumsan’s mother-in-law, were also killed in the airstrike.
On Tuesday, Abu al Qumsan had gone to register the births at a local government office. While he was there, neighbors called to say the home where he was sheltering with his family had been bombed.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said. ‘I am told it was a shell that hit the house.’
Footage shoes the hysterical father being consoled by others at the hospital as he is holding up the twins’ birth certificates in tears.
Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan cries and mourns as he shows the birth certificates of his twins after he learnt the news that his wife, 4-day-old twins babies and mother had died following Israeli attacks at the morgue of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al Balah, Gaza on August 13
This picture was shared widely on social media purportedly showing the twins shortly after they were born
Footage shoes the hysterical father being consoled by others at the hospital
Abu al Qumsan and his wife had heeded orders to evacuate Gaza City in the opening weeks of the war and went further south, where they sought shelter in central Gaza, as the army had instructed.
More than 10 months into its war with Hamas, Israel’s relentless bombardment of the isolated territory has wiped out extended families. It has left parents without children and children without parents, brothers or sisters.
And some of the sole survivors are so young they will have no memory of those they lost.
Reem Abu Hayyah, just three months old, was the only member of her family to survive an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip late Monday.
The Israeli strike destroyed a home near the southern city of Khan Younis, killing 10 people.
The dead included Abu Hayyah’s parents and five siblings, ranging in age from 5 to 12, as well as the parents of three other children. All four children were wounded in the strike.
‘There is no one left except this baby,’ said her aunt, Soad Abu Hayyah. ‘Since this morning, we have been trying to feed her formula, but she does not accept it, because she is used to her mother’s milk.’
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strikes.
The military says it tries to avoid harming Palestinian civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in dense residential areas, sometimes sheltering in and launching attacks from homes, schools, mosques and other civilian buildings.
But the army rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children. Gaza’s Health Ministry says nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, without saying how many were fighters.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 in the October 7 attack into southern Israel that ignited the war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often said that ‘they killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents’ to illustrate the brutality of the attack, most recently in his address to the U.S. Congress last month.
His wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth by Cesarean section and announced the twins’ arrival on Facebook . She and her mother, Abu al Qumsan’s mother-in-law, were also killed in the airstrike
On Tuesday, Abu al Qumsan had gone to register the births at a local government office. While he was there, neighbors called to say the home where he was sheltering with his family had been bombed (pictured: Abu al Qusam standing over the bodies of his family)
The father was consoled by others at the hospital as he was crying hysterically
Reem Abu Hayyah (pictured), just three months old, was the only member of her family to survive an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip late Monday
The Israeli strike destroyed a home near the southern city of Khan Younis, killing 10 people. The dead included Abu Hayyah’s parents and five siblings, ranging in age from 5 to 12, as well as the parents of three other children. All four children were wounded in the strike
Israel’s offensive has left thousands of orphans – so many that local doctors employ an acronym when registering them: WCNSF, or ‘wounded child, no surviving family.’
The United Nations estimated in February that some 17,000 children in Gaza are now unaccompanied, and the number is likely to have grown since.
The Abu Hayyah family was sheltering in an area that Israel had ordered people to evacuate from in recent days.
It was one of several such orders that have led hundreds of thousands to seek shelter in an Israeli-declared humanitarian zone consisting of squalid, crowded tent camps along the coast.
The vast majority of Gaza’s population has fled their homes, often multiple times. The coastal strip, which is just 25 miles long by about 7 miles wide, has been completely sealed off by Israeli forces since May.
Around 84 per cent of Gaza’s territory has been placed under evacuation orders by the Israeli military, according to the United Nations.
Many families have ignored the evacuation orders because they say nowhere feels safe, or because they are unable to make the arduous journey on foot, or because they fear they will never be able to return to their homes, even after the war.