Born and died during Gaza war, infant twins buried in Rafah
- Last updated: March 3, 2024 | 19:11
Born a few weeks into the Gaza war, infant twins Wesam and Naeem Abu Anza were buried on Sunday, the youngest of 14 members of the same family whom Gaza health authorities say were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Rafah overnight.
Their mother, Rania Abu Anza, held one of the twins, its tiny body wrapped in a white shroud, to her cheek and stroked its head during the funeral on Sunday.
A mourner held the second baby close by, pale blue pyjamas visible beneath a shroud. "My heart is gone," wept Abu Anza, whose husband was also killed, as mourners comforted her. She resisted when asked to release the body of one of the babies ahead of burial. "Leave her with me," she said, in a low voice.
The twins — a boy and a girl — were among five children killed in the strike on a house in Rafah, according to the health ministry in Gaza. Abu Anza said she had given birth to them — her first children — after 11 years of marriage.
Abu Anza 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.
'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!"
"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."
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.'"
"We were asleep, we were not shooting and we were not fighting. What is their fault? What is their fault, what is her fault?" Abu Anza said. "How will I continue to live now?"
The members of the Abu Anza family killed in the strike were lined up in black body bags. A man wept over the body of one of the dead, a child wearing pyjamas.
"God have mercy on her, God have mercy on her," said another man, consoling him.
Abu Anza said she had been wishing for a ceasefire before the Holy Month of Ramadan, which begins around March 10.
US President Joe Biden has expressed hope one will be agreed by then. "We were preparing for Ramadan, how am I supposed to live my life? How?" she said.
Reuters / AFP