Mohammed Abu al-Kumsan was about to get birth certificates for his newborn twins when he learned that he, along with his wife and their mother, had been killed in an Israeli attack on the Gaza apartment where they were sheltering.
They waved laminated documents, considered a rare symbol of joy in the besieged Palestinian territory, while one man held them as they wept at the morgue where their bodies were brought.
“My wife, my two children and my mother-in-law are gone. I was told a tank shell hit the apartment they lived in,” said Abu al-Qumsan, 31, recalling the devastating phone call he received from neighbours.
She and others carried her boy and girl, Asser and Aseel, wrapped in white shrouds – a common sight in Gaza, where millions of people regularly flee in search of shelter because of Israel’s land and air campaign.
As the bodies were loaded into the back of a car, a man prayed and a crowd gathered and watched from the balcony of an emergency room at Al-Aqsa Marys Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in the heart of the coastal strip.
Ten months after the war in Gaza began, air strikes, artillery fire and severe shortages of medicine, food and clean water have brought one of the world’s most densely populated places to its knees.
“Today, it went down in history that the occupation forces targeted newborn children, barely four days old, including twins, and their mother and grandmother,” said Khalil al-Dakran, a doctor at the hospital.
Israel says it does everything possible to avoid civilian casualties and has accused arch-enemy Hamas of using human shields, but the militants deny the charges.
The conflict began with a cross-border attack on Israel on October 7 after a Palestinian Iranian-backed militant group killed 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostage, according to Israeli figures.
Israel retaliated with attacks that killed nearly 40,000 people and wounded more than 92,000, according to Gaza health officials, and reduced much of the enclave to rubble
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