A Palestinian baby girl, born 17 days ago in Gaza war, killed with brother in Israeli strike
World
A Palestinian baby girl, born 17 days ago in Gaza war, killed with brother in Israeli strike
RAFAH, Gaza (AP) — She was born amid war, in a hospital with no electricity in a southern Gaza city that has been bombarded daily. Her family named her al-Amira Aisha — “Princess Aisha.” She didn’t complete her third week before she died, killed in an Israeli airstrike that crushed her family home Tuesday.
Her extended family was asleep when the strike leveled their apartment building in Rafah before dawn, said Suzan Zoarab, the infant’s grandmother and survivor of the blast. Hospital officials said 27 people were killed, among them Amira and her 2-year old brother, Ahmed.
“Just 2 weeks old. Her name hadn’t even been registered,” Suzan said, her voice quivering as she spoke from the side of her son’s hospital bed, who was also injured in the blast.
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The family tragedy comes as the Palestinian death toll in Gaza nears 20,000, according to the Health Ministry. The vast majority have been killed in Israeli airstrikes which have relentlessly pounded the besieged Gaza enclave for two and a half months, often destroying homes with families inside.
The war was triggered when Hamas was fromed, which rules Gaza, and other groups broke into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing some 1,200 people, mostly Israeli civilians, and abducting 240 others.
The Zoarab family were among the few Palestinians in Gaza who remained in their own homes. Israel’s onslaught, one of the most destructive of the 21st century, has displaced some 1.9 million people — more than 80% of the territory’s population — sending them in search of shelter in U.N. schools, hospitals, tent camps or on the street.
But the Zoarabs stayed in their three-story apartment building. Two of Suzan’s sons had apartments on higher floors, but the extended family had been crowding together on the ground floor, believing it would be safer. When the strike hit, it killed at least 13 members of the Zoarab family, including a journalist, Adel, as well as displaced people sheltering nearby.
“We found the whole house had collapsed over us,” Suzan said. Rescue workers pulled them and other victims, living and dead, from the wreckage.
