Four-Day-Old Twins Killed in Gaza Airstrike While Father Registers Their Births
Four-day-old twins were killed in this area in an Israeli airstrike when the father was outside registering the children’s births. The man, a father of the twins, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan, described the event as he clutched at the twins’ birth certificates during the funeral at the hospital where their bodies were taken.
The twins, known as Asser and Ayssel, were born four days earlier to the parents, Libnanese Abuel-Qomasan Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist by profession. On Tuesday, Abuel-Qomasan had gone to one of the local government offices to register births. While he was there, neighbours phoned to tell him that the house his family was hiding in, close to Deir al-Balah, had been attacked with missiles. The airstrike killed the newborns, their mother, Arafa and their grandmother. The family had moved from Gaza City, according to the orders of the Israeli army and moved to central Gaza.
In another incident in Gaza, a three-month-old baby girl, Reem Abu Hayyah, was the only survivor in an Israeli bombardment near Khan Younis in which her whole family of seven was killed. That late Monday night strike also killed the parents of three other children and injured the children as well.
Soad Abu Hayyah, Reem’s aunt, said that the crux of their problem was the baby’s refusal to take formula after the mother died. The health ministry in Gaza said it has registered 115 dead babies since the start of the war, along with nearly 40,000 dead people in the Israeli assaults since October 7. The missing are estimated to be buried beneath the debris. The Israeli defence forces have said that they do their best to minimise the suffering of civilians, accusing Hamas of residing among the population.
The present conflict situation implies that thousands of families are affected and have left their homes and have refused to move according to the warning of being evacuated since they fear for their lives or their houses’ lives. The war has also produced a steadily increasing stream of orphans, as local surgeons mark their cases with the abbreviation WCNSF: wounded child, no surviving family.
The United Nations estimated that about 17 thousand children in Gaza do not have parents as of February, and this number has presumably risen in light of the conflict. Most of the families, including the Abu Hayyah family, were taking refuge in zones that Israel had demanded to be cleared. Even though the Israeli authorities have accused the Hamas peace and other social facilities and structures attacked to be hotbeds for terrorists, concrete evidence for such claims has not been produced by the Israeli authorities.
The situation continues to be so grim, hundreds of families are displaced, and the death toll is not decreasing as the war continues.
