15 August 2024
Newborn twins precision- targeted by IOF as father went to get birth certificates
4-day-old newborn twins in Gaza were targeted by the IOF with their mother and grandmother in their temporary home as their father went to collect birth certificates earlier Tuesday.
This is the temporary apartment where the new born twins were staying with their parents and grandmother.
A surgical strike - with minimal damage to surrounding infrastructure. That is what the IOF is capable of, and they took out one apartment.
To carry out a strike like that, they
had to use a very specific kind of JDam missile with a very low yield, and it requires that they point a laser at their target, which means that they have to have reconnaissance; they use infrared to see into the building.
They can see who is in there and determine whether they are male or female or adult or child, based on body heat and shape.
There were four people in that apartment. Two of them were four days old. One of them was their mother, Jumana, and the other was their grandmother.
This is who they were targeting. Those babies were four days old. Beautiful, tiny newborn, their mother, who was immobile and had just had a Caesarian, and their grandmother
Eyewitnesses said that Jumana was standing by the window trying to get an internet signal moments before the Israeli bomb struck the apartment.
Her mother had been helping her to look after the newborn twins.
The precision bomb struck the specific room they were all in and blew them out of the apartment from the fifth floor to the ground.
The contents of their home, including diapers and medication, could be seen strewn across the ground floor, too.
They had just gotten the birth certificates for Aser and Asil. When the father got home, this is what he saw.
He didn’t find out that they were all gone until he got to the hospital. He was still holding their birth certificates
"My wife fell from the fifth floor, lying on the ground in the garden of the tower. On top of her were stones and a concrete column," said Qumsan.
"The children were burned. One of them… it was not clear that he was a child. As for his other twin, he said, "all that was left was the bones."
He could not identify which one was Aser and which was Aseel.
With full knowledge and intent, the IOF targeted two newborn babies, and the White House is waiting for the IOF to investigate themselves.
Mohamed Abu Al-Qumsan, the 33-year-old new father, had just left Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, when he received a call telling him to return to the hospital.
"I got a call from people in the neighbourhood I live in," he said
"'Mohammed, are you okay? Where are you?' I asked them what was going on. They said: 'Nothing, just come to Al-Aqsa Street… they bombed the house'."
Qumsan was just round the corner from the hospital, describing the moment he received the news: "I tried to get in the car and came back right away and found them in the refrigerators, martyred.
"Five minutes after getting the birth certificate, I was getting their death certificates," Qumsan, 33, told Middle East Eye.
His wife, Jumana Abu al-Qumsan, his two children, a boy and a girl named Asser and Asseel, and Jumana’s mother were all killed by an Israeli surgical strike on their temporary home on Tuesday morning.
They lived on the fifth floor of the Al Qastal building, east of Deir al-Balah.
The family had been displaced three times since Israel’s war on Gaza began on 7 October.
They were first forcibly ejected from Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza on 13 October, to Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
They were then forced to flee to nearby Rafah, before being displaced once again to Deir al-Balah.
"This apartment is in a safe area because my wife needed some special care due to her pregnancy," said Qumsan. "It is declared within the humanitarian areas."
Since the onset of the genocide, Israel has repeatedly bombed densely populated areas marked as humanitarian safe zones.
At least 39,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October but the number is considered a low estimate as it only includes deaths registered by authorities in Gaza. The Lancet British medical journal estimates that the true number is at least 186,000 and as high as 600,000.
Jumana had been working as a doctor in the same hospital that her dead body would later be brought to.
She gave birth to Aser and Aysal on Saturday, after a difficult pregnancy. Jumana chose the babies' names herself.
"She suffered a lot for them," said Qusman, "so she preferred that she be the one to name them with distinctive names".
The 33-year-old father was carrying the birth certificate papers in his hands and had been excited to go home and show them to his wife.
"They were still in my hand," he said. "So I went to the [morgue] refrigerators to show them to her."
At least 115 babies that had been born in the last 10 months since the war began have been killed by Israeli bombardment, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
"Where are the human rights?" asked Qumsan, of the international community. "Where are my wife's and children's rights?"
"What is her fault that someone who treats and heals people should have this happen to her? What did she do?"
By the time he returned on Tuesday morning with the certificates, his family had been killed in a precision airstrike.
The family was displaced from Jabalia refugee camp, in northern Gaza and had been sheltered further south.
His wife, pharmacist Joumana Arafa, had given birth by Cesarean section and announced the twins' arrival on Facebook.
On Tuesday, he had gone to register the births at a local government office - but while he was there, neighbours called to say his temporary home had been bombed.
"I don't know what happened," he said. "I am told it was a shell that hit the house."
The couple had heeded orders to evacuate Gaza City in the opening weeks of the war, seeking shelter in the centre of the territory as the army had instructed. The father explained that they moved into the apartment because his wife was heavily pregnant and needed to rest
