Investigation shows: Israel’s attacks on Gaza have wiped out entire families

GAZA STRIP

The Associated Press has published an investigation into the rising number of casualties from Israeli attacks on Gaza, showing that between October and December, at least 60 Palestinian families lost at least 25 members.

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Almost a quarter of these families lost more than 50 family members in these weeks. In many families there is almost no one left who could document the victims, especially because the documentation and sharing of information has become increasingly difficult.

Israel is killing entire Palestinian families on an unprecedented scale. This loss is even more devastating than the physical destruction and mass displacement.

Youssef Salem’s hard drive is full of photographs of the dead. When news of their deaths was confirmed, he spent months filling a spreadsheet with their life dates, to preserve one last link to the web of relationships he thought would endure for generations to come.

“My uncles were completely wiped out. The heads of the families, their wives, children and grandchildren,” Salem said from his home in Istanbul.

Over the past two decades, ten members of his family have been killed in Israeli attacks. “Nothing is like this war,” he said.

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The AP review included casualty records released by the Gaza Strip’s Health Ministry through March, online obituaries, social media pages and spreadsheets from families and neighborhoods, accounts from witnesses and survivors, and casualty data from Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor.

In the 51-day war of 2014, fewer than 150 families lost three or more members. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, nearly 1,900 families had suffered multiple deaths in that war as of January, including more than 300 who lost more than 10 members in the first month of the war alone.

Ramy Abdu, chairman of the Geneva-based EuroMed Human Rights Monitor, which monitors the Gaza war, said dozens of his researchers in Gaza stopped documenting deaths in families in March after identifying more than 2,500 families with at least three dead. “We can hardly determine the total death toll,” Abdu said.

The killing of families across generations is a central part of the genocide case against Israel now before the International Court of Justice. Separately, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor is seeking arrest warrants against two Israeli politicians for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the deliberate killing of civilians, and against three Hamas leaders for crimes related to the October 7 attack.

Palestinians will remember entire families that have disappeared from their lives, Abdu said: “It is as if an entire village or hamlet has been wiped out.”

The deaths across generations have left a scar on Palestinian society, history and the future. Entire families are buried in mass graves, in hospital courtyards or under the stairs of the houses where they were killed.

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Even for Palestinians, detailed images and documentation are difficult to obtain. Electricity to hospitals is limited and Israel frequently cuts off communications networks. Almost all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been displaced, tearing families apart and cutting off contacts between parts of the small territory. Homes that would normally house a nuclear family are filling up with multiple generations of displaced relatives.

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Israel began its war against Gaza in retaliation for the October 7 Hamas attacks, which, according to official Israeli figures, killed more than 1,190 people, mostly civilians.

Hamas took 251 hostages. Of these, 116 are still in Gaza, but the army says 41 are dead.

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According to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-controlled area, the Israeli offensive in Gaza has killed more than 37,000 people, most of them civilians.

Eleven members of the al-Agha family were killed in a single attack on a family home during the first week of the war. In the second week, death reached Khamis al-Agha’s home.

In 2021, Khamis al-Agha, an employee of a Hamas-affiliated charity, received a call from an Israeli soldier who alluded to his ties to the militant group and warned him to evacuate his home in Khan Younis to avoid an impending airstrike nearby. Al-Agha recorded the conversation and posted it online. He did not evacuate, and no one was killed.

On October 14, there was no warning. The airstrike killed Khamis al-Agha and ten others: his wife, their four young children, his brother and his nine-year-old son and three-year-old daughter, his cousin and her 18-year-old son. Only the brother’s wife survived.

Jaser al-Agha, a second cousin of Khamis, helped medics recover bodies from the rubble.

“There is nothing left of the house,” said Jaser al-Agha.

Israel estimates that 15,000 Hamas fighters have been killed through June, but has provided no evidence or explanation. It is not clear whether that figure includes men like al-Agha, who worked in one of the hundreds of Hamas-affiliated organizations or in the government that ran life in Gaza for more than 16 years.

Israel has said it takes measures to reduce harm to civilians, such as issuing direct warnings to civilians in previous conflicts. But in this war that method has been partly replaced by evacuation orders for entire areas, which not everyone is willing or able to obey. Standards have clearly been relaxed, fuelled by anger over the Oct. 7 attacks and domestic politics, says Craig Jones, a lecturer at Newcastle University who has studied the role of Israel’s military lawyers.

The laws of war allow for a “kind of hasty warfare” with higher civilian casualties, in which the military must react quickly and under changing circumstances. But “Israel is violating the law so clearly because it is pushing the rules so far,” he said.

The AP geolocated and analyzed 10 attacks, among the deadliest between Oct. 7 and Dec. 24, finding that they struck homes and shelters with families living inside. In no case was there an obvious military target or direct warning to those inside. In one case, the family said they had raised a white flag on their building in a combat zone. In total, the attacks killed more than 500 people, including the two bombings that wiped out the Salems and three others that killed 30 members of the al-Agha family.

Latest strikes

Despite the outcry, Israel attacked Gaza again on Monday and witnesses reported explosions in the south of the besieged area. However, fighting had largely subsided on the second day of a “pause” called by the army to facilitate aid deliveries.

The relative calm came when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dissolved his war cabinet, reflecting the political fractures in the country.

David Mencer, spokesman for the prime minister’s office, said the body was dissolved following the resignation of centrist leader Benny Gantz, who had called for the formation of a war cabinet in order to join a unity government.

The “pause” in aid deliveries along a route in the south of the Gaza Strip during the day, announced by the Israeli military over the weekend, appeared to continue on Monday.

The Health Ministry in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip said it had recorded ten deaths in the past 24 hours, one of the lowest daily death tolls since the war began.

Palestinian officials reported tank fire there early Monday, before the start of the daily “local, tactical pause in military activities” announced by the army.

In Gaza City, medics at Al-Ahli Hospital said at least five people were killed in two separate airstrikes, and witnesses reported tank fire in the Zeitun district.

Residents reported that at least one attack hit the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.

The military said the disruption “will continue from 8:00 a.m. (05:00 GMT) to 7:00 p.m. (16:00 GMT) daily until further notice for humanitarian reasons along the road from the Kerem Shalom crossing to Salah al-Din Street and then north.”

The military said troops were still deployed in Rafah and the center of the Gaza Strip. There had been “close combat” in which several insurgents had been killed.

Since ground troops entered Rafah against Hamas in early May, they have killed hundreds of militants and found “hundreds” of tunnel shafts, a military statement said on Monday.

“Waiting” for Hamas

In a message for the Muslim festival of sacrifice Eid al-Adha late Sunday, US President Joe Biden called for the implementation of a ceasefire plan he outlined last month, saying it was “the best way to end the violence in the Gaza Strip”.

Biden’s plan calls for an initial six-week pause in fighting and the release of hostages by Hamas in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

Hamas insists on the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and a permanent ceasefire. Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners firmly reject a ceasefire.

He also regularly faces street protests by tens of thousands demanding an agreement to release the hostages.