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The first call informing Fares Alghoul that a relative’s home had been hit by an Israeli airstrike arrived late on a Friday. The internet in Gaza was cut only moments later, forcing him to wait 12 hours to learn the names of the 18 dead. He would have to wait even longer for the confirmation that a further 18 family members stuck under the rubble had also been killed, bringing his family’s death toll to 36.
As a journalist, Alghoul has covered all Gaza’s previous wars but now lives in Canada, where he has had to watch from a distance as generations of his family are wiped out.
Families suffering such large losses have become a feature of the current bombardment of Gaza. According to the latest statistics provided by the Palestinian health ministry in the territory, 312 families have lost 10 or more members.
At least 70% of Gaza’s population has been displaced, according to the UN, and many families have clustered together, crowding dozens of them into their homes in the hope they can avoid the heavy bombardment or at least pool increasingly scarce resources such as water, fuel and food.
“Days later, I lost my three nieces, aged 10 to 16, when they were killed with their father at their Gaza City house. My sister was in Deir al-Balah with my mother – that’s how she survived,” said Alghoul.
“You don’t have time to process your fear and sadness because you always expect the worst to come. Even if you lose family members, you postpone your condolences,” he said. “You wish people wouldn’t send you condolences because you don’t know when the next [deaths] will come.”
Airwars, which monitors harm to civilians during conflict, has recently launched a database of casualties that is constantly being updated but has already accumulated several cases involving the deaths of dozens of people in a single incident.
The organisation has logged reports of up to 69 people killed as a result of an airstrike near a market in the Jabalia refugee camp, including 13 people at the home of Abu Ashkian on 9 October. It recorded 16 members of the al-Nabahin family killed on 8 October and 25 members of the family of surgeon Dr Medhat Mahmoud Saidam on 14 October.
Airwars director Emily Tripp said that while previous wars in Gaza also saw multiple members of single families being killed in airstrikes, they were noticing that it seemed to be happening in most of the incidents they examined now.
Tripp said the number of names they were having to verify when examining incidents was much larger, to the extent that it has made the documenting of cases a longer process.
She added that it was partly due to Gaza’s urban geography, with people living in multigenerational tower-blocks and having to group together because there are so few safe places to go.
“This is anecdotal, but we were hearing that families are now really trying to stay together because, in some ways, they want to die together,” said Tripp.
She said the air campaign by Israel also appeared to be different, with increased intensity and a high number of munitions being dropped in civilian areas.
Airwars researchers came across more than 100 names of people thought killed by a recent strike in Jabalia camp, where Israel claimed it was targeting a single Hamas commander, she said.
Tripp said that Airwars has also heard that in many incidents there were no warning strikes, which the Israeli military has used in previous wars, that might have allowed civilians to escape. “Before, the warnings were such a feature of the conflict but within the first couple of weeks, that seemed to really kind of go out the window,” she said.
Ahmed Alnaouq, the co-founder of Palestinian writers’ group We Are Not Numbers, lost 21 members of his family on 22 October – his father, two brothers, three sisters, 14 nieces and nephews, and a cousin. The cousin’s wife and only daughter were killed in another airstrike last week.
With communications difficult because of unreliable internet access and electricity, Alnaouq had relied on getting information from his family through their WhatsApp group. He was the last person to send a message to that group, asking about them – a reply never came.
“My family is gone. There’s only two sisters left and they are struggling,” he said.
Their family home was in Deir al-Balah, south of the Wadi Gaza point that Israel told Gazans to evacuate to, and usually accommodated seven people. It was only on that day that his sisters had brought their children to stay there, hoping that they would be safe together because it was in the middle of town, in a crowded area away from the frontier with Israel and the sea.
He accuses Israel of intentionally bombing civilians to force them out of Gaza, and says that western governments and the media should be doing more to stop it. “I think it is really a plan to displace all the Gazans to Sinai – this is what they are trying to do. This is their plan.
“They’re trying to kill as many people as possible so they intimidate the rest to leave Gaza,” said Alnaouq. “But I know that the Palestinians will never agree to leave their homes, even if they will be killed in their homes.
“I am still in the phase of denial. I can’t really understand that this actually happened. I’m in a state of disbelief that this is actually happening and that the world is allowing Israel to do this,” Alnaouq said.
“I struggle with many things – I can’t sleep at night. I’m always restless, I can’t stand still. I feel so sad.”
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