Three-month-old Reem Abu Hayya was the only member of her family to survive an Israeli airstrike which hit their home near Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on Monday.
The strike killed 10 people. The dead included her parents and five siblings, ranging in age from 5 to 12, as well as the parents of 3 other children.
Reem and the three other children were all wounded in the strike.
“She is the only one who survived. What did these children do? They were all children, and they killed them—two, three and four-year-olds, all of them were children,” said Reem’s grandmother, Sayida Abu Hayya.
Her aunt, Souad Abu Hayya,** said they were struggling to get Reem to eat.
“She was breastfed by her mother. Now we will have to give her formula milk. Since this morning, we have been trying to feed her, but she won’t accept it.”
A few kilometres away, Mohamed Abuel-Qomasan lost his pharmacist wife and their four-day-old twins in another strike on Tuesday.
He had gone to register their births at the local government office when the home they were sheltering in near the central city of Deir al-Balah was bombed.
The family had heeded Israeli orders to evacuate Gaza City at the start of the war and had sought shelter in the centre of the enclave, as the army instructed.
More than 10 months into its war with Hamas, Israel’s relentless bombardment of the territory has wiped out extended families.
It has left parents without children and children without parents or siblings.
There are so many orphans that local doctors now use an acronym when registering them, WCNSF, or “wounded child, no surviving family”.
Six months ago, the United Nations estimated that some 17,000 children in Gaza had been left unaccompanied by the war, a number that has likely grown since then.
The Israeli military claims it tries to avoid harming Palestinian civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas, saying the militants operate in dense residential areas.
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 Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, without saying how many were fighters.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted around 250 in the7 October attack into southern Israel that ignited the war
