Humans of Gaza: 3-day-old twins killed with mother hours after birth was registered

By Humaira Ahad

A viral video recently showed a young Palestinian man crying inconsolably after receiving the devastating news of the death of his wife and newborn twins.   

“I want to see my kids. I beg you. I beg you. Let me see them,” Mohammad Abu Al-Qumsan was heard screaming as he fainted into the arms of a man who tried hard to console him.

Al-Qumsan’s wife, Jumana, his two newborns, a boy and a girl named Aser and Aseel, and Jumana’s mother, Arafa were all killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit their home on the morning of August 14.

The attack in Gaza City killed nearly two dozen people, including a nine-month-old baby.

Unaware of what was in store for him, the 33-year-old man left his makeshift accommodation in Deir al Balah in Gaza City to get birth registration certificates for his three-day-old infants.

In pictures widely circulated on social media, the freshly laminated birth certificates could be seen in al-Qumsan’s hands as he wailed and sobbed.

“They were still in my hand," he said about the registration certificates. “So I went to the (morgue) refrigerators to show them to her,” al-Qumsan said about his wife who was eager to see the birth registration certificates of her children.

“I didn’t get a chance to celebrate their birth, their mother didn’t get a chance to celebrate their birth. The children were burned. One of them… it was not clear that he was a child."

The devastated father said he could not identify which one was Aser and which was Aseel.

“All that was left was the bones,” she was quoted as saying.

Jumana had posted the exciting news of the birth of her twins on her Facebook account.

She described the birth as a “miracle” after delivering the twins through a cesarean section in stressful conditions. The elated mother replied to every congratulatory message on her post.

The couple got married just a year ago with Jumana announcing her wedding through a Facebook post. “Together forever,” she wrote in July 2023.

A pharmacist by training, she worked as an executive director at Maxcare, a health and beauty company in Gaza City.

“There’s just no justification. None,” said Murad Matar, Jumana’s boss at Maxcare.

“The Israelis have all this technology. They target using artificial intelligence, they strike based on voiceprint, on phone signals. Couldn’t they verify? Why did they attack this family?”

A video showed al Qumsan kneeling beside the shrouded bodies of his family in the Al Aqsa Hospital compound where he had come to register the birth of his children.

“She just gave birth. Please let me see her,” al-Qumsan said about his wife.

According to Jumana’s family, the 28-year-old Palestinian woman had a difficult pregnancy.

“She suffered a lot for them,” al-Qumsan recalled.

Israel's genocidal war on Gaza forced the family to relocate several times during the last ten months.

In October last year, the al-Qumsan family was forcibly displaced from the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza to Khan Younis in southern Gaza.

Then they were forced to flee to nearby Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

In a desperate attempt to protect his pregnant wife from Israel’s brutal bombing campaign unleashed on the besieged strip, the al Qumsan family finally relocated to Deir al-Balah. 

"My wife fell from the fifth floor, lying on the ground in the garden of the tower. On top of her were stones and a concrete column,” he said, recalling the horrific strike.

According to the bereaved father, the apartment was in a “safe zone”. “I relocated  to a safe area because my wife needed some special care due to her pregnancy.”

In a statement released on August 17 by UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, the so-called “humanitarian zone” has shrunk to just 11 percent of the Gaza Strip, causing chaos and fear among the displaced.

As per recent statistics by the Palestinian health ministry, nearly 115 infants born since October 7, 2023, have been killed in the genocidal war. The total death toll has now exceeded 40,000.

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