Israeli attacks on Gaza leave children without parents and parents without children

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip – Reem Abu Hayyah, just three months old, was the only member of her family to survive an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip late Monday. A few kilometers to the north, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan lost his wife and their twin babies – just four days old – in a separate attack.

More than ten months after the start of the war with Hamas, Israel’s relentless bombardment of the isolated area has wiped out extended families. Parents are childless and children have lost their parents, brothers or sisters.

And some of the only survivors are so young that they have no memory of the people they lost.

The Israeli strike late Monday destroyed a house near the southern city of Khan Younis and killed 10 people. Among the dead were Abu Hayyah’s parents and five siblings, aged between five and 12, as well as the parents of three other children. All four children were injured in the attack.

“There is no one left except this baby,” said her 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 airstrike that killed Abuel-Qomasan’s wife and his newborns – a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel – also killed the twins’ maternal grandmother. As he sat in the hospital, speechless at the loss, he held up the twins’ birth certificates.

His wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, gave birth by Caesarean section four days ago and announced the arrival of the twins on Facebook. On Tuesday, he went to a local government office to register the births. While he was there, neighbors called to say the house where he was taking refuge, near the central city of Deir al-Balah, had been bombed.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I was told it was a grenade that hit the house.”

The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the attacks.

The military says it is trying to protect Palestinian civilians from harm and blames Hamas for their deaths because the militants operate in densely populated residential areas, sometimes hiding in homes, schools, mosques and other civilian buildings and launching attacks from there.

But the army rarely comments on individual attacks, which often kill women and children. Gaza’s Health Ministry says nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began, without saying how many of them were fighters.

In the October 7 attack on southern Israel that sparked the war, Hamas-led militants killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has often said that “they killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents” to underscore the brutality of the attack, most recently in his speech to the US Congress last month.

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 United Nations estimated in February that there are currently about 17,000 unaccompanied children in Gaza, and the number is likely to have risen since then.

The Abu Hayyah family sought refuge in an area that Israel evacuated in recent days, one of several such orders that prompted hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in an Israeli-designated humanitarian zone made up of filthy, overcrowded tent camps along the coast.

The vast majority of Gaza’s population has fled their homes, often multiple times. The coastal strip, which is only 40 kilometers long and 11 kilometers wide, has been completely sealed off by Israeli forces since May.

According to the United Nations, the Israeli military has issued an evacuation order for about 84 percent of the Gaza Strip.

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.

Abuel-Qomasan and his wife had followed orders to evacuate Gaza City in the first weeks of the war. They sought shelter in the center of Gaza in accordance with the army’s instructions.

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Magdy reported from Cairo.