Gaza doctor begged to hold daughter’s body after strike killed nine of her children

Warning: Graphic content

Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip: A Palestinian doctor who rushed home from work after an airstrike hit her Gaza home begged rescuers to let her hold the body of her young daughter as they pulled the child from the rubble.

Paediatrician Alaa Najjar lost nine of her 10 children in the strike on Friday, colleagues from Nasser Hospital and Gaza’s Health Ministry said, and her husband, also a doctor, was severely injured.

Adam Najjar (left), who survived the strike, with sisters Sidra and Eve, two of the children killed.

Hamdi Najjar, the doctor’s husband, remains in critical condition with severe brain injuries, and their only surviving child, Adam, is in a moderate condition, said Ahmed al-Farra, the head of paediatric care at Nasser Hospital.

Al-Farra backed the family’s account of the deaths of the children in the strike.

Video footage of the strike’s aftermath showed Palestinian emergency workers carrying small, ashen bodies out of a building near the southern city of Khan Younis. As one was loaded onto a stretcher, a man could be heard shouting: “There are still nine down there!”

Alaa Najjar visits her critically injured husband in hospital.Credit: Anadolu via Getty Images

Alaa Najjar arrived at the scene just as her daughter Revan’s body was pulled out of the rubble, The Guardian reported. She tearfully begged rescuers to let her hold her one last time.

“Her [Revan’s] body was completely burnt from the upper part, nothing remained of her skin or flesh,” brother-in-law Ali Najjar said. “There are still two bodies of my brother’s children we could not find: the oldest, [a] 12-year-old boy, Yahya, and the six-month-old girl, Sayden.”

The children’s charred remains were put in a single body bag, said a fellow doctor at Nasser Hospital, Alaa al-Zayan.

Milena Angelova-Chee, a Bulgarian doctor also working at Nasser Hospital, told the BBC that Hamdi Najjar’s “life remains in danger”, while colleagues had told her the surviving son, Adam, was doing “reasonably well”.

The dead children ranged in age from seven months to 12 years old. The Guardian reported their names as Yahya, Rakan, Ruslan, Jubran, Eve, Revan, Sayden, Luqman and Sidra.

The home was struck minutes after Hamdi Najjar had driven his wife to work, the Associated Press reported.

“They were innocent children,” Hamdi Najjar’s brother Ismail said. “My brother has no business with [Palestinian] factions.”

The children were among 79 people killed by Israeli strikes who were brought to hospitals at the weekend, the Health Ministry said, a toll that did not include hospitals in the battered north that it said were now inaccessible.

Israel’s military said it had struck suspects operating from a structure next to its forces, and described the area of Khan Younis as a “dangerous war zone”. In a statement, it said it had evacuated civilians from the area, and “the claim regarding harm to uninvolved civilians is under review”. It blames Hamas for civilian deaths because it operates in densely populated areas.

Also on Friday in Khan Younis, two International Committee of the Red Cross staffers were killed when shelling struck their home, the ICRC said.

Gaza’s Health Ministry said the latest deaths brought the war’s toll to 53,901 since the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel in which some 1200 people were killed and 251 taken hostage, sparking the 19 months of fighting.

The ministry said 3747 people had been killed in Gaza since Israel resumed the war on March 18 to pressure Hamas to accept different ceasefire terms. Its count doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants.

Israel’s pressure on Hamas has included a blockade of Gaza since early March, which stopped food and medical supplies reaching its population of more than 2 million people. Last week, some aid trucks began entering the territory again.

COGAT, the Israeli defence body overseeing aid for Gaza, said 388 trucks had entered in recent days. About 600 trucks a day entered during the ceasefire.

Warnings of famine by food security experts, and images of desperate Palestinians jostling for bowls of food at the ever-shrinking number of charity kitchens, led Israel’s allies to press the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow some aid to return.

AP

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