Gaza man loses wife, newborn twin babies; says he was told a shell hit their house
A Palestinian man lost his twin babies and wife in what he was told was the shelling of their home in the Gaza Strip, as he went to get birth certificates for the newborns.
Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan’s wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth by cesarean section over the weekend and announced the twins’ arrival on Facebook.
On Tuesday, he had gone to register the births at a local government office. While he was there, neighbors called to say the home where he was sheltering, near central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah, had been bombed.
Along with his wife and newborns — a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel — the strike also killed the twins’ maternal grandmother.
As he sat in a hospital, stunned into near-silence by the loss, he held up the twins’ birth certificates.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I am told it was a shell that hit the house.”
The IDF rarely comments on individual strikes and did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the incident.
Previously, the IDF has said that it carries out “many warning measures before its actions to avoid harming civilians.”
“Every strike by the IDF is based on intelligence indications of terror infrastructure or the presence of terrorists in the area of the attack,” the IDF has said.
The IDF has accused Hamas of using Palestinian civilians in Gaza as human shields and published evidence showing that the terror group uses hospitals, schools, mosques, and other civilian sites for terror purposes.
