DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip — Reem Abu Hayyah, just three months old, was the only member of her family to survive an Israeli airstrike on the Gaza Strip on Monday night. A few miles (kilometers) north, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan lost his wife and their twin babies, just four days old, in another attack.
More than 10 months after his war with HamasThe relentless Israeli bombardment of isolated territory has eliminated extended families. It has left parents without children and children without parents or siblings.
And some of the only survivors are so young that they won’t remember those they lost.
Monday night’s Israeli attack destroyed a house near the southern town of Khan Younis and killed 10 people. Among the dead were 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 injured in the attack.
“There is no one left except this baby,” said his aunt, Soad Abu Hayyah. “Since this morning we have been trying to feed her formula, but she won’t accept it because she is used to her mother’s milk.”
The attack that killed Abuel-Qomasan’s wife and their newborns (a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel) also killed the twins’ maternal grandmother. As he sat in a hospital, stunned and almost silent by the loss, he showed the twins’ birth certificates.
His wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth by cesarean section four days ago and announced the arrival of the twins on Facebook. On Tuesday he went to register the births at a local government office. While he was there, neighbors called to say that the house where he was taking shelter, near the central city of Deir al-Balah, had been bombed.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “They told me it was a projectile that hit the house.”
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the attacks.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said 115 newborns have died 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 taking cover and launching attacks from homes, schools, mosques and other civilian buildings.
But the military rarely comments on individual attacks, which often kill women and children. Gaza Ministry of Health It says nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, without saying how many were combatants.
Hamas-led militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped about 250 in the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked 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 attackmore recently in his July speech to the United States Congress.
Israel’s offensive has left thousands of orphans, so many that local doctors use 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 alone and the number has likely increased since then.
The Abu Hayyah family was taking refuge in an area that Israel had ordered the evacuation of the population. in the last few days. It was one of several such orders that have led hundreds of thousands of people to seek shelter in an Israeli-declared humanitarian zone consisting of squalid, overcrowded 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 (40 kilometers) long by about 7 miles (11 kilometers) wide, has been completely sealed off by Israeli forces since May.
According to the United Nations, around 84% of Gaza territory has received evacuation orders from the Israeli army.
Many families have ignored evacuation orders because they say nowhere seems safe, or because they cannot make the arduous journey on foot, or because they fear they will never be able to return home. even after the war.
Abuel-Qomasan and his wife had followed orders to evacuate Gaza City in the first weeks of the war. They sought refuge in central Gaza, as the army had ordered.
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Magdy reported from Cairo.
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