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Of all the children in this photo from 2019, only the two boys in the front are alive
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- Author, Stephanie Hegarty
- Roll, BBC World Service Reporter
1 hour ago
It was four in the morning and Ahmed woke up scared. He, who is normally a deep sleeper, felt something was wrong.
Since the start of the war, he had regularly checked his family’s WhatsApp group. From London, where he lives, it has been difficult to reach his father and brothers since Israel cut off electricity to the Gaza Strip. But two days earlier he had received a message from his sister Wallah.
Their house was damaged by a bomb. “The windows and doors in the house were all broken,” Wallah wrote to the group. “But the most important thing is that God saved us. We are all fine.”
“The house can be repaired,” replied Ahmed. “What’s important is that you’re safe.”
Wallah and her four children moved to her father’s home in Deir alBalah, central Gaza.
When Ahmed woke up that night, the family was quiet.
He called a friend in Gaza to find out what was going on, and that’s when he learned his family was dead.
Credit, Alnaouq family
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Ahmed’s niece Tala (9), brother Mohammed, his sister Alaa, father Nasri, younger brother Mahmoud and niece Dima (10). All were killed in the attack
Since the start of the war, Ahmed and the Gazans with whom he shares his London apartment have lived in a kind of remote hell. Your cell phones are repositories of destruction and death. Every day they receive news that a neighbor, a friend or someone they studied with has been killed.
But he never believed that the war would directly affect his family.
His family’s home is in the center of Deir alBalah, in an area that has never been attacked before.
“I thought: It’s a scary time for them, but they’re going to be OK,” he says. “That’s what I thought.”
In total, 21 people died when the family home was destroyed by an airstrike her father, three of her sisters, two brothers and 15 children.
Credit, Alnaouq family
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Ahmed with his nephew Abdullah when he last saw his family in 2019
The list of dead is so long that Ahmed is confused when listing the names and ages of everyone in his family killed.
Of the children, his 13yearold nephew Eslam was the oldest and Ahmed knew him best. Ahmed was a teenager and living in the family home when Eslam was born. His mother looked after Eslam while his sister was at work, so Ahmed often helped feed and change Eslam when he was a baby.
Eslam said he wanted to be like his uncle. He was the best in his class, says Ahmed, and dedicated himself to learning English so that he could go to Great Britain.
Eslam was born along with his younger sisters Dima, 10 years old, Tala, nine years old, Nour, five years old, and Nasma, two years old, as well as his cousins Raghad (13 years old), Bakr (11 years old old) killed. the girls Eslam and Sarah, both nine years old, Mohamed and Basema, who were eight years old, and Abdullah and Tamim, who were six years old.
Credit, Alnaouq family
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Abdullah was six years old when he was killed
The last time Ahmed saw the children was via video call. He received a bonus at work and, as was the family tradition, promised a gift to his nieces and nephews.
“Everyone said they wanted to go to the beach, rent a chalet, eat together, dance and enjoy it,” he says. So he rented a vacation home and ordered dinner and snacks for her.
The children called him from the beach that day and struggled to talk on the phone. 15 of them are now dead.
Of Ahmed’s nine siblings, only he and two sisters remain.
In the days following the attack, Ahmed posted a photo online of each of the children, including threeyearold Omar. He then received a call from his surviving sister to tell him Omar was alive. “That was the happiest moment of my life,” he says.
Omar was in bed with his mother and father, Shimaa and Muhammed, when the bomb fell. Muhammad was killed, but Shimaa and Omar miraculously survived.
The only other person rescued alive was Ahmed’s 11yearold niece, Malak. She had third degree burns on 50% of her body.
Credit, Alnaouq family
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Malak, 11, was pulled from the rubble alive but seriously injured. His brothers Mohamed and Tamim died in the explosion
When I met Ahmed, he showed me a photo of Malak in the hospital, his body completely covered in bandages. At first I thought it was a boy because her hair was short. It used to be long, Ahmed said, but it must have burned in the fire.
Malak’s father was not home when the place was hit and he is alive. But his wife and two other children were killed. When Ahmed sent him a message asking how he was doing, he replied: “A body without a soul.”
At that moment, telephone reception in Gaza was completely cut off as Israel stepped up its attack and Ahmed was unable to reach anyone. When the signal was resumed two days later, he learned that Malak had died.
With medical supplies running low, she had to be taken out of the intensive care unit when a more urgent case arrived. She was in a lot of pain. “I died a hundred times every day,” the father told Ahmed as he watched the eldest and last of his three sons disappear.
Credit, Alnajjar family
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Yousef was 4 years old when he was killed
Shortly before the communications blackout, Ahmed also discovered that his uncle’s house had been hit. He’s still not sure who was killed there.
We spoke to three people who each lost more than 20 family members in Gaza. One of them, Darwish AlManaama, lost 44 members of his family. They are dealing with grief on an unimaginable scale.
Yara Sharif, an architect and academic in London, showed me photos of her aunt’s family home, which was destroyed by an Israeli attack a week after the war began.
“It was a very beautiful house,” says Yara, “a beautiful building with a large courtyard in the middle.” It was a singlefamily home in which children built apartments for their own families on their parents’ home a tradition that led to this results in several generations being wiped out at once.
Credit, Alnajjar family
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Fátima, 5, and Anas, 3, in the garden of their home in northern Gaza before they were killed
This attack left 20 people dead Yara’s aunt and uncle, her two cousins and her ten children, as well as six members of her extended family.
Some of the bodies were recovered from the rubble and appeared as numbers on the Hamasrun health ministry’s death list.
Yara sent us a screenshot of the list with a red check mark next to each name. On the right side of the list is their ages Sama was 16, Omar and Fahmy were 14yearold twins, Abdul was 13, Fatima 10, Obaida seven, cousins Aleman and Fatima were both five, Youssef was four Sarah and Anas were three years old.
Yara has two cousins. They asked not to be named because they were concerned about an unconfirmed rumor that those who spoke to the media were being targeted.
The sisters are in different parts of the Gaza Strip and cannot communicate to hold a funeral. And anyway, Yara’s cousin sent her a message: “The bodies of Muhammad, his mother and his two children are still under the rubble.”
Credit, Alnajjar family
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Abdulraham and his cousins, the twins Omar and Fahmy. Fahmy’s body has not yet been recovered from the rubble.
There is not enough fuel to run the excavators in Gaza, and the excavators that are in operation are mainly used to rescue living people.
As I sat with Ahmed on Friday (October 27th) and watched the news, the list of the dead scrolled across the screen. I asked him if his family was there. “Only twelve,” he said. The other nine have not yet been recovered.
Last week his older sister, who was home during the bombing, visited the ruins. But she told Ahmed she wouldn’t stay long because she couldn’t stand the smell of decomposing bodies.
Ahmed hasn’t spoken to any of the sisters since Friday. His phones don’t work and he doesn’t know what happened to them.
He can’t find the words in English to describe what he’s been feeling since the bombing, as if his heart was no longer in his chest. Crying is useless, he says, because it doesn’t change anything.
And he is restless: “I feel like I can’t sit still. I can’t sit still. I can not sleep at night.”
“There’s nothing you can do to make that feeling go away.”
Credit, Alnaouq family
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Eslam, Abdullah, Raghad and Sarah
Among the dead was Ahmed’s younger brother Mahmoud. He worked at the same NGO as Ahmed, We Are Not Numbers, which trains young Palestinians to tell their stories to the world.
Mahmoud had just received a scholarship to study for a master’s degree in Australia. A week after the war began, he told Ahmed that he did not want to go and that he was very disappointed with the way the West responded to the bombing of Gaza. He posted it on Twitter. “My heart can’t take this anymore. We will be massacred.”
A week later he was killed in his father’s house.
About his father, Ahmed says he was the nicest man he ever met. He worked hard, driving taxis and working in construction to provide his family with an education. He obsessively listened to the news and believed that the only solution to this conflict was a onestate solution with Jews and Palestinians living side by side in peace.
But as Ahmed thinks about his only surviving nephew, he wonders: What will Omar believe after this war has lost so many of the people he loves?