Ibrahim Hasouna trudged through the rubble of his destroyed home, pointing out the places where family moments had taken place – where his mother and sister-in-law slept, where he played with his five-year-old nieces, where he helped his daughter . A 12-year-old nephew takes his first steps.
His entire family is now dead: his parents, his two brothers, as well as the wife and three children of one of these brothers. The house, reduced to ruins, collapsed on them under the barrage of airstrikes that Israeli military planes inflicted on Rafah before dawn on Monday.
The attack was aimed at covering the extraction by ground troops of two hostages held in the town on Gaza’s southern border.
Ibrahim, 30, his parents and brothers had arrived in Rafah a month earlier. It was just the latest of their multiple attempts to escape the fighting after fleeing their homes in northern Gaza. They rented a small one-story house on the east side of Rafah.
The strikes shattered a brief moment of joy. The family had just received three chickens – the first since the war began more than four months ago.
“The children were delighted,” Ibrahim said. The family was fed up with canned food, which was the main thing they had been able to get under the Israeli siege that allowed only a trickle of humanitarian aid to reach Gaza.
They planned to eat the chicken on Sunday evening. But during the day, Ibrahim went to visit a friend on the other side of Rafah, who convinced him to spend the night. Ibrahim called home and the precious meal was delayed so as not to miss it. Ibrahim’s mother, Suzan, put the chickens in the neighbor’s refrigerator.
Shortly after 2 a.m. Monday, Ibrahim began receiving calls from friends telling him that strikes had taken place in the neighborhood where his family lived. Unable to reach them by phone, he returned home on foot and by motorbike.
He saw massive destruction. The first thing he saw was a woman’s arm being thrown across the street to the door of a nearby mosque. It was his mother’s. He searched through the rubble and tore off body parts.
He later went to Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital and identified the bodies of his mother and his father, Fawzi, an engineer. His younger brother Mohammed’s body had no head, but he recognized the clothes.
In a bag the staff brought to him were pieces of his brother Karam and his family. He recognized bits of his niece Suzan from her earrings and a bracelet, which she always fought over with her sister.
Israel said the bombing was intended to cover its troops as they extracted two Israeli captives from an apartment and returned out of Gaza. The army did not explain why specific sites in Rafah were targeted by the barrage, but Israeli officials accused Hamas of causing civilian casualties by operating in the heart of residential areas.
The scale of the bloodshed caused by the raid has heightened fears about what could happen if Israel keeps its promise to attack Rafah as part of its campaign to destroy Hamas. The city and its surrounding areas are now home to more than half of the Gaza Strip’s total population of 2.3 million, after hundreds of thousands sought refuge there.
The Israeli campaign in Gaza has killed more than 28,000 Palestinians, more than 70 percent of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.