Muhammad Abu al-Khumsan left his house only for a few moments. It was time to register her twins, born three days earlier, at the civil registry in Gaza. After the certificates were printed, he received a call: “Your house has been bombed.”
• Read more: Airstrikes on Gaza Ahead of Ceasefire Talks
“I still had the papers and I wanted to show them to my wife and they told me, ‘You will find her in the cold room of the morgue,'” the displaced south told AFPTV west of the Gaza Strip, which has been bombarded by Israel since October 7.
“I wanted to tell him that I had spelled the children’s first names, Asar and Aysel, correctly,” she continues, unable to hold back tears in front of the small blue tent sheltered in the seaside retreat of Al-Mawasi. 46 km near Khan Yunis, which the Israeli army has declared a humanitarian zone.
If he failed here, it was because the apartment he occupied with his family on the fifth floor of a building in Deir al-Bala, further north, was reduced to rubble by an airstrike on Tuesday.
Layers not found
“I can’t see the bodies,” said a tearful and dizzy person at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, circulating on social media. His drama sparked outrage from internet users around the world and a US State Department spokesperson was questioned by a journalist.
Now alone, Muhammad Abu al-Khumsan carries with him piles of never-used laundry he bought with his wife during her pregnancy.
Here, little yellow pajamas with buttonholes decorated with white daisies — “We bought them on the way back from the doctor’s, Jumana absolutely wanted two” — she believes, and there’s another, pink.
From the hastily carried bag, Dad also grabs a half-full diaper bag.
“We had difficulty finding these diapers. For three months, we have been trying to buy some,” he explains, adding that everything is scarce in the Gaza Strip, where milk and diapers are expensive.
On July 20, 2023, when he married Jumana Arafa, a young pharmacist, the Gaza Strip was enjoying a hot and peaceful summer. The Israeli siege continued for 17 years and any chance of breaking out of the tiny territory seemed impossible.
But the young couple had a dream: to have children. The war did not give up on them.
On October 7, Hamas commandos launched an unprecedented offensive in Israel that resulted in the deaths of 1,198 people, the majority civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
Israel’s response has killed nearly 40,000 people to date — including 115 children under the age of eight months — according to the health ministry in Hamas-controlled Gaza.
“More Than My Sister”
Pregnant Jumana did not stop working.
In the Gaza Strip, where only 16 hospitals are still partially functional – for a population of 2.4 million – he volunteers every day to help treat the injured and chronically ill.
“Until her seventh month, she helped in hospitals, thanking God for sending her children,” testified the widow who lost her mother-in-law in Tuesday’s strike.
“My mother and my brothers were transferred for treatment in Egypt, and only my sister remains in Gaza,” he says, sitting on a thin foam mattress.
In more than ten months of war, “we lost friends, we lost loved ones, we suffered a lot, we were scared a lot, we ran a lot,” he says.
“I was always worried that my wife would miscarry because she was always moving from one place to another,” he continues.
Today, Muhammad Abu al-Khumsan does not move. Prostrate before his tabernacle, he must one day resolve to amend this birth certificate without faith. Include the date of death of his daughter and son.
