(13 Aug 2024)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip – 13 August 2024
1. Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan, who lost his wife and their twin babies in an Israeli strike, crying in the morgue
2. Various of Abuel-Qomasan kneeling near covered bodies of his wife and twin babies
3. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Abuel-Qomasan, lost his wife and twin babies:
"Because she was pregnant, we had to be in an apartment. She was a doctor. She was martyred.
Reporter (Arabic): "And your children, were they four days old?"
Abuel-Qomasan (Arabic): "They were born on August 10. She gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl."
4. Various of Abuel-Qomasan being comforted outside the morgue
5. SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan, lost his wife and babies: ++STARTS ON PREVIOUS SHOT AND PARTIALLY OVERLAID BY SHOTS 7-8
"People from the neighborhood called me and told me that ‘the house you live in was bombed’. My wife, my two children and my mother-in-law were gone. I was away to get the birth certificates for the babies. My wife gave birth the day before yesterday. I didn’t even have the time to celebrate them. She gave birth by caesarean section and she was still tired and couldn’t walk. I can only say that Allah is sufficient for me, and He is the best disposer of affairs (a phrase used to express grief and reliance on God for justice).”
7. People carrying bodies out of the morgue
8. Various of people praying for victims
9. Car being loaded with bodies in bags
STORYLINE:
Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan was waiting to pick up the birth certificates of his newborn twins on Tuesday when he received the news that his wife and their babies had been killed in a bombardment in central Gaza.
Crying and screaming, the young father was comforted by others inside the morgue in Deir al-Balah, where the bodies of his family were wrapped in plastic bags.
Asser, a boy, and Ayssel, a girl, were the young couple’s first children.
They were born by caesarean section on August 10.
Days later they were killed together with their mother and maternal grandmother in what witnesses said was a shelling where the family was sheltering.
As Abuel-Qomasan sat in a hospital, he held up the twins’ birth certificates.
Earlier on Tuesday he had gone to register the births at a local government office.
While he was there, neighbors called to say their house had been bombed.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the bombardment.
The military says it tries to avoid harming Palestinian civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas because the militants operate in dense residential areas, sometimes sheltering in and launching attacks from homes, schools, mosques and other civilian buildings.
But the army rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children.
Gaza’s Health Ministry says nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since the start of the war, without saying how many were fighters.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 in the October 7 attack into southern Israel that triggered the war.
AP video shot by Abd Al Kareem Hana
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