By Humaira Ahad

A recent video circulated online showed a young Palestinian man crying inconsolably after receiving the devastating news of the death of his wife and newborn twins.

“I want to see my children. I beg you. I beg you. Let me see them,” Mohammad Abu Al-Qumsan was heard screaming as he fainted in the arms of a man who tried his best to comfort him.

Al-Qumsan’s wife Jumana, his two newborns, a boy and a girl named Aser and Aseel, and Jumana’s mother Arafa were all killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit their home on the morning of August 14.

The attack in Gaza City killed nearly two dozen people, including a nine-month-old baby.

Not knowing what awaited him, the 33-year-old man left his makeshift shelter in Deir al Balah in Gaza City to obtain birth certificates for his three-day-old babies.

Pictures widely shared on social media showed the freshly laminated birth certificates in al-Qumsan’s hands as he moaned and sobbed.

“I still had them in my hand,” he said of the birth certificates. “So I went to the refrigerators (in the morgue) to show them to her,” al-Qumsan said of his wife, who was eager to see her children’s birth certificates.

“I had no opportunity to celebrate her birth, her mother had no opportunity to celebrate her birth. The children were burned. One of them… it was not clear whether he was a child.”

The devastated father said he could not tell who was Aser and who was Aseel.

“All that was left were the bones,” she was quoted as saying.

Jumana had posted the exciting news of the birth of her twins on her Facebook account.

She described the birth as a “miracle” after the twins were delivered by Caesarean section under stressful conditions. The ecstatic mother responded to every congratulatory message under her post.

The couple married just a year ago and Jumana announced their wedding via a Facebook post. “Together forever,” she wrote in July 2023.

She is a trained pharmacist and worked as managing director at Maxcare, a health and beauty company in Gaza City.

“There is simply no justification. None,” said Murad Matar, Jumana’s boss at Maxcare.

“The Israelis have all this technology. They target with artificial intelligence, they strike based on voice profiles and phone signals. Couldn’t they check that? Why did they attack this family?”

A video showed al Qumsan kneeling next to the shrouded bodies of his family on the grounds of Al-Aqsa Hospital, where he had come to register the births of his children.

“She just gave birth. Please let me see her,” al-Qumsan said of his wife.

According to Jumana’s family, the 28-year-old Palestinian had a difficult pregnancy.

“She suffered a lot for them,” al-Qumsan recalled.

Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza has forced the family to move several times in the last ten months.

In October last year, the al-Qumsan family was forcibly displaced from the Jabalia refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip to Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip.

They were then forced to flee to nearby Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

In a desperate attempt to protect his pregnant wife from Israel’s brutal bombing of the besieged Strip, the al Qumsan family eventually moved to Deir al-Balah.

“My wife fell from the fifth floor and remained lying on the ground in the tower’s garden. There were stones and a concrete pillar on top of her,” he said, recalling the horrific impact.

According to the grieving father, the apartment was in a “safe zone.” “I moved to a safe area because my wife needed special care due to her pregnancy.”

A statement released on August 17 by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said the so-called “humanitarian zone” had shrunk to just 11 percent of the Gaza Strip, causing chaos and fear among the displaced.

According to recent statistics from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, nearly 115 infants born since October 7, 2023 have been killed in the genocidal war. The total death toll now exceeds 40,000.