A Gaza father mourns the loss of his young son, who was killed in bed in an Israeli airstrike

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip – The dead Palestinian toddler’s limbs were pale and cold despite Gaza’s sweltering summer heat. Outside the hospital, his father cradled the boy in his arms, unable or unwilling to say goodbye. Flies circled and landed in the child’s soft hair.

“What did he do wrong, my God? What did he do wrong?” Mahmoud Mikdad shouted in a hoarse voice, raising his face to the sky.

His son, Yaman, was killed in an Israeli airstrike. Hospital records and health officials say more than 60 Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes in the southern and central Gaza Strip from Monday night into Tuesday. Israel has said it is pursuing Hamas fighters hiding among civilians after offensives destroyed underground tunnel systems.

For Mikdad, it was a normal afternoon. He put his daughter and Yamam down for a nap in the apartment where the displaced family was staying.

The boy died instantly from the blow. He was not yet two years old.

Mikdad carried Yamam’s body through central Gaza from the Nuseirat camp to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah. Yamam’s bare legs dangled limply from beneath a white, blood-soaked sheet.

Mikdad and two others, one with a bandaged head, caressed and kissed the boy’s body outside the morgue. The child in his lap was “more valuable than the whole world,” Mikdad told an Associated Press photojournalist. He sat leaning against the hospital wall for a while and cried.

Later, about a dozen men said a funeral prayer over Yamam’s body, which was wrapped in a white shroud. The bystanders, including children, watched in silence.

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Callister reported from New York.