GAZA, (PIC)
One of the most horrific outcomes of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip over a period of more than 7 months is the complete eradication of Palestinian families through indiscriminate or deliberate shelling. It makes no distinction between young and old, men and women, combatants and civilians. The tragedy lies in the fact that the entire family, or the majority of it, is wiped out of existence, leaving only what people remember about them and how their lives ended in the blink of an eye at the hands of a criminal Nazi-like enemy, under the sight and hearing of an international community concerned only with protecting the killers.
Since the start of the Israeli barbaric aggression on the Gaza Strip, families began to flee to places claimed by the Israeli occupation army as safe areas, especially in the southern Gaza Strip. Many houses and homes turned into collective shelters where the owners and their displaced relatives resided. However, the Zionist desire for revenge against every Palestinian, following the humiliating defeat suffered by the occupation army on the 7th of October last year, drove them to reveal their brutality and sadism by betraying the vulnerable, including women, children, the sick, and the elderly, and targeting densely populated areas to annihilate them completely.
The record of genocide in Gaza is filled with the names of families that were once registered in civil records but have now become records of martyrs and missing persons in the blink of an eye. No part of the northern, central, or southern regions of the Gaza Strip has been spared from the savagery of the occupation, which recognizes no law or ethics.
In some families, the father, mother, and most of the children, even extended family members, were martyred, leaving only one child or one individual from each family. This survival in itself becomes a harsh curse for those who have lost all their loved ones and no one has survived with them alone.
Missing and disappeared
The fate of thousands of missing persons is still unknown, amidst the difficulties faced by medical rescue teams and civil defense in reaching the targeted neighborhoods due to the continuation of indiscriminate shelling, in addition to the shortage of equipment and the severe damage inflicted on roads. Meanwhile, hope remains with some that their relatives are among the displaced to other areas or even among those detained by the occupation army (enforced disappearance).
Journalists and concerned individuals have affirmed that attempting to compile the names of martyrs and their families who have fallen victim to the intensive and continuous bombardment in various areas of the Gaza Strip is a difficult task, especially in light of the ongoing aggression by the occupation army.
The Israeli aircrafts continue to intensify their airstrikes in several areas, including Al-Nusairat camp, Jabalia camp, and several areas in the city of Rafah. The death toll, since the 7th of October, has reached approximately 35,000 martyrs recorded in hospitals in the Gaza Strip.
Family extermination
The cycle of martyrdom in the Agha family has been ongoing since October 7th of last year in Israeli massacres that have resulted in the documented martyrdom of around 104 individuals, including 31 children and 24 women of that family. Furthermore, there are 8 detainees whose fate remains unknown, as they are still being forcibly hidden under extremely difficult detention conditions.
On December 19th of last year, the Salem family was scheduled to meet a final fate for their children’s lives. The Israeli Air Force targeted a residential building in the Al-Rimal neighborhood where a large number of this family had taken refuge after leaving their homes in the conflict-affected areas. However, the enemy did not spare them, whether they were residents or displaced. They bombed them, resulting in over 100 martyrs in a single moment.
After the massacre, civil defense crews, in cooperation with the citizens, tried to ascertain the outcome of the massacre, but they couldn’t identify all of them due to the inability to rescue the remaining victims from under the rubble of the residential building. Even the counting of the martyrs was approximate based on what they found, and they were not all accounted for.
The Awad family, one of the families that lost about 100 of its members in one go, only had 10 survivors, all with severe injuries, some of whom had lost limbs.
Sequential shelling and targeting of the Abdul Ghafour family’s homes in several areas and cities in the Gaza Strip resulted in the erasure of entire families from the civil registry. The massacres included women, children, dignitaries, and elders of the family. Since the beginning of the aggression, 72 martyrs have been reported.
On the morning of January 7th, 2024, the occupying forces committed a massacre against the Abu Alba family when they attacked the homes of civilians in the Al-Falouja area of Jabalia camp in the northern Gaza Strip. A house belonging to the family was targeted, and it was announced that more than 70 martyrs, mostly children, had been killed.
The Hamouda family also suffered a series of airstrikes carried out by the Israeli Air Force in the Khan Yunis camp and in displacement areas within Gaza, between the end of October and the end of December 2023. These airstrikes resulted in the martyrdom of over 60 people of the family, mostly women and children.
During the early weeks of the aggression on Gaza, the number of families whose records were wiped out exceeded 100 families. But now, this number has multiplied dozens of times. Sometimes you find that more than 30 members of a single family have been martyred, and the number can exceed 50 or even reach 70 or more. For example, the Naffar family had 50 martyrs, including a four-month-old baby. In the Shihab family massacre, 44 people were martyred, including 20 children, one of whom was a baby, and 26 women. There was also the Malka family massacre, which claimed the lives of 26 people, in addition to the massacre of the writer Youssef Dawas’ family, in which 27 members of his family were martyred in Beit Lahia on October 14th last year. The Nauq family had 21 martyrs, and the Ghoul family had 48 martyrs.
The technology of genocide
Gaza’s Government Media Office revealed that more than 3,100 Palestinian families have been subjected to Israeli bombing with tons of explosives that leave only a few survivors, who are often martyred later or lose their limbs or some of their senses.
The occupation army uses advanced technological systems supported by artificial intelligence to identify the data of targeted families. Through these systems, they determine the ages and numbers of individuals inside the buildings, after which they deliberately bomb them.
