GAZA STRIP: As men searched for survivors beneath a Gaza home pummelled by an air strike, Rania Abu Anza gazed down on Sunday at two children who did not survive: her infant twins.

The Palestinian woman said she had gone through multiple rounds of fertility treatment to achieve her dream of becoming a mother, only to have it taken away by the carnage in the Gaza Strip.

“Who will call me mother from now on? Who will call me mother?” she said through tears on Sunday as she clutched her lifeless babies, the face of one still spattered with blood.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Wissam and Naeem, not yet six months old, were among 14 people killed in the overnight strike in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, which it blamed on Israel. All of the dead were members of the Abu Anza family.

‘Who will call me mother?’: woman mourns twin babies killed during Israeli strike

They joined the 30,410 fatalities, most of them women and children, reported by the ministry since Israel launched military operations last October. The Israeli military did not immediately respond for comment on the Rafah strike.

‘All of them children’

While Rania Abu Anza waited to bury her son and daughter, back at the rubble of the family home men shouted the names of those they hoped had survived: “Yasser! Ahmed! Sajjar!” Israel says its campaign is intended to eliminate Hamas fighters, but Shehda Abu Anza, who said the home belonged to his uncle, insisted it housed only civilians.

“They were sleeping at eleven-o-clock at night. All of them children. Honestly there was no military presence in the house, only civilians,” he said.

“No soldiers, only civilians.” Another relative, Arafat Abu Anza, bemoaned the lack of equipment to extract possible survivors. “There are 15 people in the house... I’m cleaning the area. We are trying to extract people, to see where they are. Four floors fell.”

Nearly 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge in Rafah, raising fears of mass casualties should Israel go ahead with a planned invasion of the city. Mediators are trying to lock in a truce that would at least temporarily halt the fighting before Ramazan, which begins on March 10 or 11, depending on the lunar calendar.

Any deal will come too late for Rania Abu Anza, who recounted the chaos of the strike and how she was told her children were gone. “I started shouting, ‘My children, my children,’” she said. “I asked the rescuers to search for my kids in the rubble. They pulled them.

They told me, ‘Your children are dead.’”

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2024