This Mother In Gaza Spent 10 Years Trying To Have A Baby Only For Her Twins To Be Killed By An Israeli Strike
“They were all dead. Their father took them and left me behind,”Rania Abu Anza said. “How will I continue to live now?”
A Palestinian mother who spent 10 years trying to get pregnant has lost her twin babies, who were born and killed during Israel’s war on Gaza, as well as her husband at the same time.
Rania Abu Anza’s five-month-old twins, a boy named Naeem and a girl named Wissam, and her husband, were all killed after an Israeli strike hit the home of her extended family in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza late Saturday, March 2.
Naeem and Wissam had been born on Oct. 13, less than a week after the start of the war in Gaza on Oct. 7.
Rania and her husband, Wissam, both 29, spent a decade trying to get pregnant, going through two rounds of failed IVF before finally conceiving of them from a third round in early 2023.
Her husband, a day laborer, was so proud he insisted on naming the girl after himself, she said.
Speaking the day after the death of her children and husband, Rania said that she had woken up to breastfeed Naeem at around 10pm the night earlier then settled back to sleep, holding him in one arm and cuddling baby Wissam with the other.
Her husband was sleeping beside them.
Suddenly, an hour and a half later, an explosion occurred, causing their house to collapse. “I screamed for my children and my husband,” she said, sobbing and cradling a baby’s blanket to her chest. “They were all dead. Their father took them and left me behind.”
“I didn’t get enough of them,” she said. “I swear I didn’t get enough of them.”
“How will I continue to live now?” Rania added.
In addition to her husband and children, 11 of Rania’s other relatives were also killed, including a sister, a nephew and a cousin who was pregnant, and another nine remain missing under the rubble.
Of the 14 people killed in Rania’s house, six were children and four were women, according to Dr. Marwan al-Hams, the director of the hospital where the bodies were taken.
Israeli airstrikes have regularly hit crowded family homes since the start of the war, even in Rafah, which Israel had declared a safe zone in October but is now the next target of its planned ground offensive.
The strikes often come without warning, usually in the middle of the night. Israel’s airstrikes and ground offensives have killed more than 30,000 Palestinians most of them women and children since the war began in Gaza on Oct. 7.
