Four-day-day old twins have been killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza while their father went to register their birth, he has said, as Israel continued its bombardment of the territory.
Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan said his wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth by caesarean section four days earlier and announced the twins’ arrival on Facebook, the Associated Press reported.
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 told the AP while sitting at the hospital where their bodies were taken, holding the twins’ birth certificates. “I am told it was a shell that hit the house.”
The strike that killed the newborns – a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel – also killed their mother, Arafa, as well as her mother, the twins’ grandmother. 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.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strikes, AP reported.
Elsewhere, a three-month-old baby was the only member of her immediate family to survive an Israeli airstrike near the southern city of Khan Younis in which 10 people were killed including her five siblings, aged five to 12.
The strike late on Monday also killed Reem Abu Hayyah’s parents and the parents of three other children. Reem and the other three surviving children were all wounded in the strike.
“There is no one left except this baby,” said Reem’s 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 health ministry in Gaza said 115 newborns had been killed in the territory since the war began. Almost 40,000 people have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza since 7 October; thousands more are believed to be buried under the rubble. About 1,200 people were killed when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October and 250 taken hostage.
The Israeli military claims it tries to avoid harming Palestinian civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in dense residential areas.
Since 4 July Israeli forces have targeted at least 21 schools – including at one point four in four days – where Palestinians were sheltering, killing hundreds of people, many of them children, according to the UN. Israel claimed the schools were being used by Hamas operatives without providing evidence.
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 UN estimated in February that about 17,000 children in Gaza were 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. 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.
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.
Associated Press contributed to this report