A Palestinian man’s wife and newborn twins were killed in an Israeli airstrike this week in Gaza, while he was at a local government office registering the birth of his new children.
Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan’s newborns—a boy named Asser and a girl named Ayssel—were just four days old, The Associated Press reported. His wife, Joumana Arafa, was a pharmacist and had given birth to the twins by cesarean section. While Abuel-Qomasan was at a local government office on Tuesday to register their births, neighbors called and told him that the home he had been staying in, close to the city of Deir al-Balah, had been bombed. The twins’ maternal grandmother also died in the airstrike.
“I didn’t even have the time to celebrate them,” Abuel-Qomasan told AP.
A new round of cease-fire talks are set to take place in Doha, Qatar on Thursday. Officials from Israel, Qatar, the U.S., and Egypt are meant to attend, but it’s not yet clear if Hamas will join the negotiations.
The Hamas-led Gaza Ministry of Health said 115 newborns have been killed and nearly 40,000 Palestinians have died in the war since it began on Oct. 7—figures that the U.S. government and the U.N. deem credible.
The Israeli military has said that it attempts to avoid harming Palestinian civilians, blaming their deaths on Hamas by saying that the group operates in dense residential areas. The International Court of Justice, the top U.N. court, ruled in July that Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territories is “unlawful,” calling for it to end.
Video of Abuel-Qomasan grieving his wife and children has been circulating on social media. Photos of him holding up the twins’ birth certificates have also been widely shared on social media platforms.
Abuel-Qomasan and his wife had followed evacuation orders to leave Gaza City in the early weeks of the war, and took refuge in central Gaza, per the Israeli military’s instructions, which is where they were when the tragedy struck, according to AP.
