Israeli attacks leave children orphaned and parents childless

Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip. Reem Abu Hayyah, just three months old, was the only member of her family to survive an Israeli airstrike on the Gaza Strip on Monday night. A few kilometres to the north, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan lost his wife and his twins, just four days old, in another attack.

More than 10 months into the war against Hamas, Israel’s relentless bombardment of the isolated enclave has wiped out extended families, leaving parents without children and children without parents, brothers or sisters.

And some of the sole survivors are so young they won’t even remember those they lost.

The Israeli attack on Monday night destroyed a house near the southern city of Khan Yunis, killing 10 people. Among the dead were Abu Hayyah’s parents and his five siblings, aged between 5 and 12, as well as the parents of three other children. All four children were wounded in the attack.

“There is no one left except this baby,” said her aunt, Soad Abu Hayyah. “Since this morning, we have tried to feed her formula, but she won’t accept it because she is used to her mother’s milk.”

The attack that killed Abuel-Qomasan’s wife and newborn children, a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel, also resulted in the death of his maternal grandmother. Sitting in the hospital, stunned and almost silent by the loss, he held the twins’ birth certificates.

His wife, pharmacist Joumana Arafa, had given birth by Caesarean section four days earlier and announced the twins’ arrival on Facebook. On Tuesday, he went to register the births at a local government office. While there, neighbours called him to say that the house where he was sheltering, near the city of Deir al-Balah, in the centre of the enclave, had been bombed.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “They told me that a shell had hit the house.”

The Israeli military has not yet responded to a request for comment on the attacks.

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

But the agency 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 start of the war, without specifying how many of them were combatants.

Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and kidnapped 250 more in the Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that kicked off the war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has frequently said that they “killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents” to illustrate the brutality of the attack, most recently in his speech to the U.S. Congress last month.

The Israeli offensive has left thousands of orphans – so many that local doctors use an acronym when registering them: WCNSF, or “wounded child with no surviving relatives.” The UN estimated in February that some 17,000 children in Gaza are currently alone, and the number is likely to have risen since then.

Many families have ignored evacuation orders because they say there is no safe place, or because they cannot 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 obeyed orders to evacuate Gaza City in the first weeks of the war. They sought refuge in central Gaza, as ordered by the Israeli army.