BEIRUT (news agencies) — Israel’s air and ground campaign in Gaza has killed hundreds of family members from the same bloodline, an unprecedented toll on the small community mostly made up of refugees and their descendants.
An media investigation analyzed 10 strikes across the Gaza Strip between October and December that killed over 500 people. Nearly every Palestinian family has suffered grievous, multiple losses. But many have been decimated, particularly in the first months of the war.
news agencies geolocated and analyzed the strikes; consulted with weapons investigators; open data-analysts and legal experts; and drew on data by Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor. They hit residential buildings and shelters with families inside. In no case was there an obvious military target or direct warning to those inside. In one case the family said they had raised a white flag on their building in a combat zone.
This war has proven even deadlier than the displacement from Israel in 1948, said Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American historian at Columbia University, when 20,000 were killed in what is known as the Nakbah, or Catastrophe.
“I don’t think anything like this has happened in modern Palestinian history,” said Khalidi.
On Oct. 11, an airstrike levelled Amin al-Agha’s home in western Khan Younis. The 61-year-old was asleep on the ground floor of the two-story building with his wife and three sons. The top floor was the home of his son Muhannad al-Agha, 30, his wife Hind and their two girls, Talin, 2, and Asil, 1. The airstrike killed 11 in the family, including two cousins in an adjacent building.
“It was no longer a house. It was a pile of sand,” said Jaser al-Agha, a cousin who arrived shortly after the strike.
Early Oct. 14, an Israeli bomb struck the house of Khamis al-Agha, an employee of a Hamas-linked charity. The three-story building in central Khan Younis was reduced to rubble. Among the dead: Khamis al-Agha, 38, his wife, Nisreen, two sons, aged 11 and 13, two daughters, 8 and 6, and his younger brother and 9-year-old son, a cousin and her son. Only the brother’s wife survived.
On Nov. 14, the house of Awni al-Agha, a second cousin to Khamis, was hit, destroying the three-story building in western Khan Younis. Brian Castner, weapons investigator with Amnesty International, said the damage indicated it was an airstrike as well.
Only a satellite dish was sticking out above the debris. The strike killed the wife of Awni al-Agha, 64-year-old Samia; his four sons, aged between 42 and 26, his daughter Ramah, 41, her husband and two sons, aged 18 and 16. Awni al-Agha, a government education official, survived because he had woken up for dawn prayers. Three months later, in February, Awni al-Agha died at the age of 69, most likely of a broken heart, said Jaser al-Agha.
Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, said her investigators struggled to grapple with the killing of entire families, across generations.
“At times we had to create family trees to understand the civilian harm,” she said.
Israeli aircraft struck the homes of Abu Naja and Madi families in southern Rafah on Oct. 17. Twenty members of Abu Naja family were immediately killed, including two pregnant women, and eight children. The airstrikes killed the 78-year-old grandmother, her granddaughter and her children. Airwars said one of the men killed was identified on Facebook as a “Mujahid” or “warrior.” His wife, pregnant sister, and her 2-year-old daughter also died.
Killing a fighter who is not participating in hostilities and is in a place crowded with civilians is considered a violation of the laws of war.
An Israeli airstrike destroyed a church building in Gaza City where hundreds of displaced were sheltering. The Oct. 19 strike killed 20 members of the intermarried Tarzai and Souri families, from the dwindling Christian community in Gaza, including at least seven children. Ramez al-Souri lost all three children and his wife.
Israel’s military said it struck a Hamas command-and-control center, accusing the group of embedding among civilians. It acknowledged that a church wall was damaged.
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