Israeli Airstrike Kills Four-Day-Old Twins In Gaza – Report

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  •  As father, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan registers births
  • Claims wife, mother-in-law also killed in strike that hit home

As Israel continued its bombardment of the territory, four-day-old twins were reported killed in an airstrike in Gaza while their father, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan went to register their birth.

Abuel-Qomasan said his wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth by cesarean 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.

According to AP reports, the Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strikes and the unfortunate incident.

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 were 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.

United Nations (UN) reports claim that since 4 July 2024, 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.

On its part, Israel has continued to claim that 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. –  With The Guardian report

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