Gaza:
As men searched for survivors beneath a Gaza house ravaged by an airstrike, Rania Abu Anza looked down Sunday at two children who did not survive: her young twins.
The Palestinian woman said she had undergone multiple fertility treatments to achieve her dream of becoming a mother, but that dream was taken away by the massacre in the Gaza Strip.
“Who will call me mother from now on? Who will call me mother from now on?” she said through tears Sunday as she held her lifeless babies, one's face still splattered with blood.
The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Wissam and Naeem, less than six months old, were among 14 people killed in the overnight attack in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, which it blamed on Israel .
All the dead were members of the Abu Anza family.
They joined the 30,410 fatalities, most of them women and children, reported by the ministry since Israel launched military operations to eliminate Hamas last October.
The campaign came in response to the Palestinian group's unprecedented Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of about 1,160 people, according to an AFP tally of official figures.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment on the attack in Rafah.
'All children'
As Rania Abu Anza waited to bury her son and daughter, men at the rubble of the family home shouted the names of those they hoped had survived: “Yasser! Ahmed! Sajjar!'
Israel says its campaign is aimed at eliminating Hamas fighters, but Shehda Abu Anza, who said the house belonged to his uncle, insisted only civilians lived there.
'They were asleep at eleven o'clock at night. They were all children. Frankly, there was no military presence in the house, just civilians,” he said.
“No soldiers, only civilians.”
Another family member, Arafat Abu Anza, complained about the lack of equipment to extract possible survivors.
'There are fifteen people in the house… I'm cleaning the area. We're trying to get people out, see where they are. Four floors fell.”
Nearly 1.5 million Palestinians have taken refuge in Rafah, raising fears of mass casualties if Israel goes ahead with a planned invasion of the city.
Mediators are trying to broker a truce that would at least temporarily end the fighting before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which begins on March 10 or 11, depending on the lunar calendar.
A senior Hamas official told AFP that the group had sent a delegation to Cairo, and Egyptian state media said envoys from the United States and Qatar had also arrived for talks on Sunday.
Any deal will come too late for Rania Abu Anza, who recounted the chaos of the strike and how she was told her children were gone.
“I started screaming, 'My children, my children,'” she said.
“I asked the rescuers to look for my children in the rubble. They pulled them away. They told me: 'Your children are dead.'”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)