Iyad Chaqoura, a pharmacy doctor who worked as an emergency doctor during the war, was used to the flood of dead and wounded. On Monday evening, he fainted as he watched the bodies of his two children, his mother and other family members arrive at Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
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Doctor Chaqoura, 42, was horrified to learn that his family was among the victims of an attack that hit their home in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, which has been under siege by Israel and relentlessly bombed by Hamas since the start of the war with Hamas .
With misty eyes, he took a final look at his loved ones wrapped in white shrouds and arranged on mortuary tables in the emergency room at Nasser Hospital on Tuesday morning, according to images obtained by AFPTV.
AFP
He points to the bodies one by one and lists their names: “my mother, Zeinab Abou Dayya, my brothers Mahmoud and Hussein Chaqoura, my sister Israa and her two children Nabil and Nour, and my two children, the students of mine.” Eyes , Abdelrahmane, 7 years old, and Omar, 5 years old.
“I have five children, but he was my favorite child,” he said, resting his forehead on Abdelrahmane’s bloody forehead for a long time. His shroud and that of his brother are opened at head height, revealing their faces.
AFP
“What did they do to have tons of bombs and explosives thrown at their heads in their houses,” he complains, then adds resignedly: “God called them back to Himself like many other children before them.”
Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip have claimed more than 10,300 lives, including 4,237 children, since the war began on October 7, according to the latest report released Tuesday by the Hamas Health Ministry.
AFP
They were launched in retaliation for an attack of unprecedented magnitude by the Palestinian movement on Israeli soil. According to Israeli authorities, the war in Israel has claimed more than 1,400 lives, with most civilians dying on the day of the attack.
Doctor Chaqoura comes from a family of refugees, Palestinians who were forced into exodus when the State of Israel was founded in 1948 and who, according to UN figures, now represent around 80% of the 2.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip with their descendants.
“If the enemy wants to drive us out again, let us tell him that God has promised us one of two things: either to triumph in our liberated land or to be buried there,” he declared. “Now I will bury my children and go back to work.”
AFP
He himself leads the ritual funeral prayer in the hospital courtyard. His colleagues and relatives stand in a row behind him, and the bodies of his children and other family members lie on stretchers in front of him.
The bodies are then taken to the nearby “Cemetery of the Martyrs of Khan Younes”.
During the procession to the cemetery, Doctor Chaqoura carries in his arms the remains of Abdelrahmane, which he kisses on the head one last time.