A father has lost his four-day-old twins, his wife and mother-in-law in an Israeli airstrike as he went to get the twins’ birth certificates.
Mohammed Abu al Qumsan’s newborn twins – a boy, Asser, and a girl, Ayssel – were born over the weekend and were just four days old when they were killed in the strike on their home near the central city of Deir al-Balah.
His wife, Joumana Arafa, a pharmacist, had given birth by Cesarean section and announced the twins’ arrival on Facebook. She and her mother, Abu al Qumsan’s mother-in-law, were also killed in the airstrike.
On Tuesday, Abu al Qumsan had gone to register the births at a local government office. While he was there, neighbors called to say the home where he was sheltering with his family had been bombed.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ he said. ‘I am told it was a shell that hit the house.’
Footage shoes the hysterical father being consoled by others at the hospital as he is holding up the twins’ birth certificates in tears.
