‘My children, my children’: Gaza family killed minutes before the ceasefire | Israel-Palestine conflict news

Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Palestine – U cease fire in Gaza should start at 8:30 am (06:30 GMT). The al-Qidra family had endured 15 months of Israeli attacks. They had been moved more than once and were living in a tent. Their relatives were among the more than 46,900 Palestinians killed by Israel.

But the al-Qidras had survived. And they wanted to go home.

Ahmed al-Qidra packed his seven children on a donkey cart and headed east to Khan Younis. It was finally safe to travel – the bombing should have stopped.

But the family did not know that the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas had been delayed. They did not know that, even during those additional hours, Israeli planes were still hovering over the skies of Gaza, ready to drop their bombs.

The explosion was loud. Ahmed’s wife, Hanan, overheard. She had been at a relative’s house in the city center, organizing her things, planning to join her husband and children a few hours later.

“The explosion felt like it hit my heart,” Hanan said. Instinctively she knew that something had happened to her children, whom she had only just said goodbye to.

“My children, my children!” she shouted.

The cart had been hit. Hanan’s eldest son, 16-year-old Adly, was dead. So was his youngest, six-year-old Sama, the baby of the family.

Yasmin, 12, explained that a four-wheel drive was in front of the cart carrying people celebrating the ceasefire. Maybe that was why the missile hit.

“I saw Sama and Adly lying on the ground, and my father bleeding and unconscious on the cart,” said Yasmin. He pulled his eight-year-old sister Aseel out before a second missile hit the spot where they had been standing. Eleven-year-old Mohammed also survived.

But Ahmed, Hanan’s life partner, was pronounced dead at the hospital.

“My children were my world”

Sitting on the edge of her injured daughter Iman’s hospital bed at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Hanan was still in shock.

“Where was the ceasefire?” she asked. In their excitement to finally return to what was left of their home, the family had missed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who said that the Palestinian group Hamas had not sent the names of the three Israeli prisoners who would be released on Sunday as part of the ceasefire agreement.

They had not seen Hamas explain that there were technical reasons for the delay, and that the names would be provided, as they eventually were.

Little did they know that in the three-hour delay before the ceasefire eventually began, three members of their family would be killed. They were among the 19 Palestinians killed by Israel in these last hours, according to the Civil Defense of Gaza.

Hanan burst into tears. She now had to face life without her husband and two of her children. The loss of Sama, “the last of the bunch” as she described it with the Arabic word, was particularly hard.

“Sama was my youngest and most spoiled. He got angry every time I talked about having another child.

Adly was his “pillar of support.” His children were his world.

“We have endured this entire war, facing the harshest conditions of displacement and bombing,” Hanan said. “My children are facing hunger, lack of food and basic needs.”

“We survived over a year of this war, only to be killed in its last minutes. How can this happen?”

A day of joy had turned into a nightmare. The family had celebrated the end of the war the night before.

“Hasn’t the Israeli army had enough of our blood and the atrocities they have committed for 15 months?” Hanan asked.

So, he thought about his future. With her husband and two of her children torn from her, and with tears falling down her face, she asked him: “What is left?”