Gaza, 14 August 2024 (TDI): Newborn twins were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza while their father was at a local government office to register their birth.
Asser, a boy, and Ayssel, a girl, were just 4 days old when their father Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan went to collect their birth certificates.
While he was away, his neighbours called to say their home in Deir al Balah had been bombed.
The attack also killed his wife and the twins’ grandmother.
Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said that 115 infants have been born and then killed during the war.
The family had followed an order to evacuate city in the first weeks of the Israel-Gaza war, seeking shelter in a central part of the strip, as the Israeli military instructed.
Israel said it tries to avoid harming civilians and blames their deaths on Palestinian group Hamas operating in dense residential areas, including using civilian buildings as shelter.
But officials rarely comment on individual attacks.
Several such shelters in Gaza have been targeted in the past few weeks.
On Saturday, an Israeli attack on a school building sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City killed over seventy people, the director of a hospital said.
Hamas-led gunmen killed nearly twelve hundred people in an attack on Israel on 7 October, taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages.
That attack triggered a massive Israeli military operation on Gaza and the current war.
Over 39,790 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli offensive, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.
