The Electronic Intifada 20 September 2024
Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan holds up the birth certificates for his twins, who were killed along with their mother while he was registering their births.
It is one of the quirks of genocide that a certain amount of bureaucracy carries on as before.
Births, for instance, still have to be registered. Deaths too.
Increasingly, however – tragically, appallingly – the time between a birth and death in Gaza is growing narrower.
Indeed, Gaza’s health ministry in August announced that according to its records, 115 babies had been born and died during Israel’s now 11 month-long genocide.
In the case of the 114th and 115th victims on that list – twins Ayser and Isal – their lives lasted just 48 hours.
“The two babies were sleeping like angels,” the twins’ father, Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan, recalled. He had left his wife, Jumana, to register their names at a government office.
“When I received the birth certificates, I was keen to go home and to see her reaction and happiness with their names,” Muhammad told The Electronic Intifada. It was Jumana who had chosen their names.
But on his way home, Muhammad received a call saying that his house had been bombed.
“I was terrified,” he said.
His fear soon turned to shock and grief when he heard that his young family had already been taken to the morgue.
“I almost went crazy,” Muhammad remembered.
He said he was told that a tank shell had hit the apartment and the room in which his wife – a doctor – was staying with her children and her mother, killing them all.
Jumana’s body fell from the fifth floor into the tower’s garden and was found on top of piles of stones and a concrete column. The children’s bodies were burned so badly, one child was no longer recognizable.
Muhammad was still in shock. He clung to a bag of his children’s clothes.
“They have not worn their new clothes yet.”
More than 14,000 children have been killed in the Israeli genocide so far, though real numbers are expected to be much higher.
Fedaa al-Qedra is a journalist in Gaza.
