A child in Gaza watched his mother burn alive. Then he died too.

On Tuesday night, in the Qarara area east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza, brothers Muhammad and Ibrahim Hamidi decided to take their children and flee to a less dangerous location east of the city. The sound of heavy gunfire from tanks stationed near their home after a brutal night of nonstop shelling and bombardment pushed them to head toward the Mawasi area of Khan Younis, the same coastal stretch of land that had served as a so-called “safe zone” throughout the war.

The brothers arrived and set up their tents. In the middle of the night, Muhammad heard the sound of bombing. He emerged from his tent, hundreds of meters away from his brother Ibrahim’s. He was rushing toward the sound of the bombs to help people who had been hit — a common sight in Gaza — but he didn’t expect that the bombed tent would belong to his brother. 

“I ran out, thinking the bombing might have targeted a family we know. When I arrived, I found my brother lying on the ground, covered in blood, and his wife holding their child, both of them on fire,” Muhammad Hamidi told Mondoweiss. “My nephew was lying on the ground, injured in his head and back, and looking at his mother. She was engulfed in flames with his younger baby brother. Then my nephew turned his head toward his father, who was bleeding after the missile struck his head.”

With deep sadness, Muhammad says that in his final moments, his three-year-old nephew watched his mother and brother burn. “The child was helpless,” he said. 

When his mother was burned alive while cradling her one-year-old son, she was also carrying a fetus in her womb. All three lives were snuffed out. 

“Rasha Abu Hindi was martyred here while cradling her son, Amir Hamidi,” Muhammad said of his sister in-law and his baby nephew. “Ibrahim and his daughter, Ajnad, were seriously injured. We don’t know if they are alive or dead now. Their injuries are very severe.”

Ibrahim worked during the war selling falafel after his workplace was bombed. “This family was killed for no reason. They have no political affiliation,” Muhammad stressed. “He was a simple father selling falafel to provide for his family. These are the targets of the Israeli ‘Defense’ Forces: a father selling falafel with three children, their mother, and her unborn child.”

The Hamidi brothers, along with millions across Gaza, were plunged into Israel’s genocidal onslaught once more following its announcement on Tuesday that the ceasefire was officially over. In the span of a few hours, Israel had killed well over 450 people, according to the Gaza-based Ministry of Health. 

The war is back, and with it, the screams under the rubble. Israeli bombardment has hardly subsided since early Tuesday morning, targeting everything indiscriminately just as it did before the ceasefire, including schools housing the displaced, residential homes, tent encampments, and a UN compound in Deir al-Balah.

Extermination of entire families

Muntaser Qreiqeh stands in the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City surrounded by the bodies of over 30 members of his family. A number of the dead were still buried under the rubble after Tuesday morning’s bombing of the family’s residential area in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in Gaza City. Most of the dead were children and women, but survivors say almost the entire family was wiped out.

“All my cousins, all my relatives. [Israel] dropped explosive barrels on their heads while they slept,” Qreiqeh tells Mondoweiss. “My entire family was wiped out.”

He points to the bodies with his hand and says, “These are the [ceasefire] negotiations they’re talking about. These are the results of the negotiations.”

In an area near the site of the Qreiqeh family’s annihilation, the Israeli army also wiped out the al-Hattab family, killing 28 people in an airstrike targeting their family building.

Sumaya al-Hattab, a survivor from the family, stands and points to her extended family’s home, which has now become a family grave.

“This is the home of my father and my uncles. The army bombed them and killed them all. Over 28 people were inside the building. None of them survived, and we haven’t been able to extract them from under the rubble,” Hattab tells Mondoweiss.

Rescue teams were able to extract only two infants from the bombed building. The rest of the family is yet to be found.

“We found them dead in their beds,” Hattab explains. “Most of the building’s residents were women and children. We are searching for their beds to find them because they were all bombed while they were asleep.”

Civil Defense crews in Gaza have been trying to retrieve the bodies of the dead using makeshift and rudimentary tools due to the continued lack of heavy machinery in the Strip, making recovery impossible.

Mahmoud Basal, the Civil Defense spokesperson, told Mondoweiss that the martyrs of the Hattab family will be added to the list of 10,000 martyrs trapped under the rubble due to the impossibility of retrieving them. “This massacre is one of the most horrific since the April 2024 massacre at al-Shuhada Hospital. We said at the time that there wouldn’t be another day in which the occupation kills over 400 people in a few hours,” he said.

“But the occupation intensified its raids, carrying out more than 100 raids in a single minute and killing over 400 people, including over 170 children and 80 women. All of them were killed at the same time,” Basal added. “Civil Defense crews rushed to retrieve them and provide aid, but we lacked the capabilities and resources to extract them. The Hattab family is only one example.”

“The occupation has destroyed our machinery and our first response system, and we have nothing left to carry out our work,” Basal added.