“I started yelling, ‘My kids, my kids,'” she said
Gaza:
As people searched for survivors under airstrikes in Gaza on Sunday, Rania Abu Anza stared down at the two children who did not survive: her twin infants.
The Palestinian woman said she underwent multiple rounds of fertility treatments to fulfill her dream of becoming a mother, only to have that dream snatched away by the massacre in Gaza.
“Who will call me mommy from now on? Who will call me mommy?” she said through tears on Sunday, holding her dead babies, one of whom had blood splattered on his face.
An overnight attack in the southern Gaza city of Rafah killed 14 people, including Wissam and Naim, who was not yet six months old, the Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry said, blaming Israel for the attack.
All the deceased were members of the Abu Anza family.
They are among the 30,410 people, mostly women and children, who have been reported dead since last October when Israel launched a military campaign to eliminate Hamas.
The movement was in response to an unprecedented attack by Palestinian groups on southern Israel on October 7, which killed about 1,160 people, according to official AFP statistics.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to AFP’s request for comment on the Rafah attack.
“They are all children”
As Rania Abu Anza waited to bury her son and daughter, in the rubble of her home, men shouted the names of those they hoped had survived: “Yasser! Ahma De! Sajar!”
Israel said its operation was aimed at eliminating Hamas militants, but Shehda Abu Anza said the house belonged to his uncle and insisted only civilians lived inside.
“They went to bed at 11 o’clock at night. They were all children. To be honest, there were no military personnel in the house, only civilians,” he said.
“There are no soldiers, just civilians.”
Another relative, Arafat Abu Anza, lamented the lack of equipment to rescue possible survivors.
“There were 15 people in the house… I’m clearing the area. We’re trying to rescue people and see where they are. Four floors collapsed.”
Nearly 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge in Rafah, and there are fears of mass casualties if Israel goes ahead with its planned invasion of the city.
Mediators are trying to reach a truce to halt fighting at least temporarily until the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Ramadan begins on March 10 or 11, depending on the lunar calendar.
A senior Hamas official told AFP the group had sent a delegation to Cairo, and Egyptian state media said envoys from the United States and Qatar had also arrived in Cairo on Sunday for talks.
Any agreement came too late for Rania Abu Anza, who described the chaos of the strike and how she was told her children were missing.
“I started yelling, ‘My kids, my kids,'” she said.
“I had rescuers looking for my children in the rubble. They pulled them out. They told me, ‘Your children are dead.'”
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