Israel’s attacks on Gaza leave families severely broken
- Offensive has left so many orphans that local doctors use an acronym when registering them: WCNSF or ‘wounded child, no surviving family’
Palestinians inspect the damage following overnight Israeli bombardment of a house at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. Photo: AFPReem Abu Hayyah, just three months old, was the only member of her family to survive an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip late Monday. A few kilometres to the north, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan lost his wife and their twin babies – just four days old – in another strike.
More than 10 months into its war with Hamas, Israel’s relentless bombardment of the isolated territory has wiped out extended families. It has left parents without children and children without parents or siblings.
And some of the sole survivors are so young they will have no memory of those they lost.
The Israeli strike late Monday destroyed a home near the southern city of Khan Younis, killing 10 people. The dead included Reem’s parents and five siblings, ranging in age from five to 12, as well as the parents of three other children. All four children were wounded in the strike.
“There is no one left except this baby,” said her 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 strike that killed Abuel-Qomasan’s wife and newborns – a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel – also killed the twins’ maternal grandmother. As he sat in a hospital, stunned into near-silence by the loss, he held up the twins’ birth certificates.
His wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth by caesarean section four days ago and announced the twins’ arrival on Facebook. 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 said. “I am told it was a shell that hit the house.”
The Health Ministry in Gaza said 115 newborns have been killed in the territory since the war began. Gaza’s Health Ministry says nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strikes.
The military says it tries to avoid harming Palestinian civilians. They blame their deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in dense residential areas, sometimes sheltering in and launching attacks from homes, schools, mosques and other civilian buildings.
But the army rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 in the October 7 attack last year into southern Israel that ignited the war.
Deadliest Israeli strike on Gaza since war began kills 100 Palestinians
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 United Nations estimated in February that some 17,000 children in Gaza are now unaccompanied, and the number is likely to have grown since.
The Abu Hayyah family was sheltering in an area that Israel had ordered people to evacuate in recent days. It was one of several such orders that have led hundreds of thousands to seek shelter in an Israeli-declared humanitarian zone consisting of squalid, crowded tent camps along the coast.
The vast majority of Gaza’s population has fled their homes, often multiple times. The coastal strip, which is just 25 miles (40km) long by about 7 miles (11km) wide, has been completely sealed off by Israeli forces since May.
Around 84 per cent of Gaza’s territory has been placed under evacuation orders by the Israeli military, according to the United Nations.
Many families have ignored the evacuation orders because they say nowhere feels safe, or because they are unable to make the arduous journey on foot, or because they fear they will never be able to return to their homes, even after the war.
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.