There are no words to describe the horror that Gazans have experienced daily since Israel’s relentless bombardment of the Palestinian enclave. An entire family mourned the loss of ten of its members, including eight children, on Thursday.
The small corpses lie lined up on the floor of Khan Younes’ mortuary. According to rescuers and witnesses, they belong to the al-Bakri family clan. At the European hospital, seven children’s remains were placed in white shrouds about to cover their bloody faces, surrounded by their family members, an AFP photographer noted.
Between the ages of two and five
Dyala (2 years old), Ayman (3 years old), Hamada (5 years old) and Zaher (2 years old) Bakri, as well as Oudai and Jamal Abou Al-Naja and Nabil and Acil Omran, aged between two and five years years old, “were asleep when they [les Israéliens] destroyed the house that collapsed on their heads,” the patriarch of the Bakri family, Abu Mohammad Wafi al-Bakri, 67, told AFP.
According to witnesses, they were on the ground floor of the three-story house between Khan Younes and Rafah and their bodies were recovered an hour after the raid. “None of my children have connections to Palestinian organizations. There were no men in the house at the time of the bombing,” he added.
The population is paying a very high price for the war that was triggered by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas’ attack on Israeli soil from the Gaza Strip on October 7th. More than 1,400 people were killed in Israel, most of them civilians who were shot, burned alive or died as a result of mutilation on the first day of the attack. At least 3,785 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed in Israeli retaliatory strikes. This is according to a count by the Hamas Ministry of Health on Thursday, in which at least 1,524 children were killed.