Four-day-old twins were killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip as their father went to register their birth, he said, as Israel continued its shelling of the area.
Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan said his wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had delivered the twins by Caesarean section four days earlier and announced the arrival on Facebook, the Associated Press reported.
On Tuesday, he went to register the births at a local government office. While he was there, neighbors called to say that his house near the central city of Deir al-Balah, where he was taking refuge, had been bombed.
“I don’t know what happened,” he told the AP, sitting in the hospital where the bodies were taken, holding the twins’ birth certificates. “I was told it was a grenade that hit the house.”
The attack that killed the newborns – a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel – also killed their mother, Arafa, and her mother, the twins’ grandmother. Abuel-Qomasan and his wife had obeyed orders to evacuate Gaza City in the first weeks of the war. They sought shelter in central Gaza as instructed by the army.
AP reported that the Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the attacks.
Meanwhile, 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 that killed 10 people, including her five siblings aged between five and 12.
The attack late Monday also killed Reem Abu Hayyah’s parents and the parents of three other children. Reem and the other three surviving children were all injured in the attack.
“There is no one left except this baby,” said Reem’s aunt Soad Abu Hayyah. “Since this morning, we have been trying to give her formula, but she is not taking it because she is used to her mother’s milk.”
The Gaza Health Ministry said 115 newborns had been killed in the area since the war began. Nearly 40,000 people have died in Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7, with thousands more believed buried under the rubble. About 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage in the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
The Israeli military claims it is trying to protect Palestinian civilians from harm and blames Hamas for their deaths because the militants operate in densely populated residential areas.
Since July 4, Israeli forces have attacked at least 21 schools – four of them within four days – where Palestinians had sought refuge. According to the UN, hundreds of people have been killed, including many children. Israel has claimed that the schools are used by Hamas members, but has not provided any evidence.
The Israeli offensive has left thousands of orphans – so many that local doctors use an acronym when registering them: WCNSF, which means “wounded child, no surviving family.” The UN estimated in February that about 17,000 children were unaccompanied in Gaza, and the number is likely to have risen since then.
The Abu Hayyah family sought refuge in an area that Israel has ordered to vacate in recent days, one of several such orders that have prompted hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone made up of filthy, overcrowded tent camps along the coast.
Many families ignored the evacuation orders because they felt unsafe anywhere, because they could not manage the arduous journey on foot, or because they feared they would never be able to return to their homes even after the war.
Associated Press contributed to this report
