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Born and Died During Gaza War, Infant Twins Are Buried in Rafah

Rania Abu Anza (C) the mother of twin babies Naeem and Wissam, killed in an overnight Israeli air strike, mourns their death ahead of their burial in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 3, 2024, as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas continues. (AFP)
Rania Abu Anza (C) the mother of twin babies Naeem and Wissam, killed in an overnight Israeli air strike, mourns their death ahead of their burial in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 3, 2024, as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas continues. (AFP)
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Born and Died During Gaza War, Infant Twins Are Buried in Rafah

Rania Abu Anza (C) the mother of twin babies Naeem and Wissam, killed in an overnight Israeli air strike, mourns their death ahead of their burial in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 3, 2024, as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas continues. (AFP)
Rania Abu Anza (C) the mother of twin babies Naeem and Wissam, killed in an overnight Israeli air strike, mourns their death ahead of their burial in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on March 3, 2024, as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas continues. (AFP)

Born a few weeks into the Gaza war, infant twins Wissam and Naeem Abu Anza were buried on Sunday, the youngest of 14 members of the same family whom Gaza health authorities say were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Rafah overnight.

Their mother, Rania Abu Anza, held one of the twins, its tiny body wrapped in a white shroud, to her cheek and stroked its head during the funeral on Sunday. A mourner held the second baby close by, pale blue pyjamas visible beneath a shroud.

"My heart is gone," wept Abu Anza, whose husband was also killed, as mourners comforted her. She resisted when asked to release the body of one of the babies ahead of burial. "Leave her with me," she said, in a low voice.

The twins - a boy and a girl - were among five children killed in the strike on a house in Rafah, according to the health ministry in Gaza. Abu Anza said she had given birth to them - her first children - after 11 years of marriage.

"We were asleep, we were not shooting and we were not fighting. What is their fault? What is their fault, what is her fault?" Abu Anza said.

"How will I continue to live now?"

Relatives said the twins had been born some four months ago, about a month into the war which began on Oct. 7, when Hamas stormed Israel, in an attack that killed 1,200 people and resulted in another 253 being abducted, according to Israeli tallies.

Israel's offensive has killed more than 30,000 people in the Gaza Strip since then, according to Gaza health authorities, laying waste to the territory and uprooting most of its population.

The members of the Abu Anza family killed in the strike were lined up in black body bags. A man wept over the body of one of the dead, a child wearing pyjamas. "God have mercy on her, God have mercy on her," said another man, consoling him.

Abu Anza said she had been wishing for a ceasefire before Ramadan, the Muslim holy fasting month which begins around March 10.

US President Joe Biden has expressed hope one will be agreed by then. "We were preparing for Ramadan, how am I supposed to live my life? How?" she said.

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Leisure ‘Forgotten’: Gaza War Drives Children to Work

Palestinian children break up stones collected from homes destroyed by previous Israeli air strikes, to sell them to make gravestones, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, 21 August 2024. (EPA)
Palestinian children break up stones collected from homes destroyed by previous Israeli air strikes, to sell them to make gravestones, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, 21 August 2024. (EPA)
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Leisure ‘Forgotten’: Gaza War Drives Children to Work

Palestinian children break up stones collected from homes destroyed by previous Israeli air strikes, to sell them to make gravestones, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, 21 August 2024. (EPA)
Palestinian children break up stones collected from homes destroyed by previous Israeli air strikes, to sell them to make gravestones, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, 21 August 2024. (EPA)

Some crush rocks into gravel, others sell cups of coffee: Palestinian children in Gaza are working to support their families across the war-torn territory, where the World Bank says nearly everyone is now poor.

Every morning at 7:00 am, Ahmad ventures out into the ruins of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, picking through the rubble produced by steady Israeli bombardment.

"We gather debris from destroyed houses, then crush the stones and sell a bucket of gravel for one shekel (around 0.25 euros)," the 12-year-old said, his face tanned by the sun, his hands scratched and cut and his clothes covered in dust.

His customers, he said, are grieving families who use the gravel to erect fragile steles above the graves of their loved ones, many of them buried hastily.

"At the end of the day, we have earned two or three shekels each, which is not even enough for a packet of biscuits," he said.

"There are so many things we dream of but can no longer afford."

The war in Gaza began with Hamas's unprecedented October 7 attack on southern Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,199 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 40,476 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory's health ministry, which does not break down civilian and militant deaths.

The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.

"Nearly every Gazan is currently poor," the World Bank said in a report released in May.

- 'Barefoot through the rubble' -

Child labor is not a new phenomenon in Gaza, where the United Nations says two-thirds of the population lived in poverty and 45 percent of the workforce was unemployed before the war.

Roughly half of Gaza's population is under 18, and while Palestinian law officially prohibits people under 15 from working, children could regularly be found working in the agriculture and construction sectors before October 7.

The widespread wartime destruction as well as the constant displacement of Gazans trying to stay ahead of Israeli strikes and evacuation orders has made that kind of steady work hard to find.

Khamis, 16, and his younger brother, Sami, 13, instead spend their days walking through potholed streets and displacement camps trying to sell cartons of juice.

"From walking barefoot through the rubble, my brother got an infected leg from a piece of shrapnel," Khamis told AFP.

"He had a fever, spots all over, and we have no medicine to treat him."

Aid workers have repeatedly sounded the alarm about a health system that was struggling before the war and is now unable to cope with an influx of wounded and victims of growing child malnutrition.

- Money gone 'in a minute' -

The paltry sums Khamis and Sami manage to earn do little to defray the costs of survival.

The family spent 300 shekels (around 73 euros) on a donkey-drawn cart when they first fled their home, and later spent 400 shekels on a tent.

At this point the family has relocated nearly 10 times and struggles to afford "a kilo of tomatoes for 25 shekels", Khamis said.

Moatassem, for his part, said he sometimes manages to earn "30 shekels in a day" by selling coffee and dried fruit that he sets out on cardboard on the roadside.

"I spend hours in the sun to collect this money, and we spend it in a minute," the 13-year-old said.

"And some days I only earn 10 shekels while I shout all day to attract customers," he added.

That's a drop in the ocean for daily expenses in a territory where prices for goods like cooking gas and gasoline are soaring.

In these conditions, "we only think about our basic needs, we have forgotten what leisure is, spending for pleasure," Moatassem said.

"I would like to go home and get back to my old life."