Three-month-old girl is only surviving member of family after airstrike
14 August 2024, 02:34
The Israeli strike on Monday destroyed a home near the southern city of Khan Younis, killing 10 people.
Three-month-old baby Reem Abu Hayyah is the only member of her family to survive an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip late on Monday.
A few miles to the north, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan lost his wife and their twin babies — just four days old — in another strike.
More than 10 months into its war with Hamas, Israel’s relentless bombardment of the isolated territory has wiped out extended families.
The Israeli strike on Monday destroyed a home near the southern city of Khan Younis, killing 10 people.
The dead included Reem Abu Hayyah’s parents and five siblings, ranging in age from five 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 strike that killed Mr Abuel-Qomasan’s wife and newborns — a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel — also killed the twins’ maternal grandmother.
As he sat in a hospital, stunned into near-silence by the loss, he held up the twins’ birth certificates.
His wife Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth four days ago and announced the twins’ arrival on Facebook.
On Tuesday, he had gone to register the births at a local government office. While he was there, neighbours called to say the home where he was sheltering, near the central city of Deir al-Balah, had been bombed.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I am told it was a shell that hit the house.”
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strikes.
The Health Ministry in Gaza said 115 newborns have been killed in the territory since the war began.
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.
Hamas-led militants killed around 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 July address to the United States Congress.
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 in recent days.
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.
Mr Abuel-Qomasan and his wife had heeded orders to evacuate Gaza City in the opening weeks of the war.
They sought shelter in central Gaza, as the army had instructed.
