Israeli air strikes hit two homes at dawn on Friday killing nine children under the age of 16
News Desk
GAZA: In Khan Yunis, a densely populated area in southern Gaza, the devastation from Israeli airstrikes early Friday claimed the lives of at least 20 people, including many children, according to Gaza’s civil defence agency. A strike on the Al-Fara family home took a particularly harrowing toll, killing 14 family members—nine of them children under the age of 16. In a separate attack on the same morning, another six lives were lost.
As the scenes unfolded, survivors of the Al-Fara family painted a haunting picture of their loss; Umm al-Ameer al-Fara, a relative who escaped the carnage, described being trapped under a pile of rubble, only to later discover that her children and sister were among the dead. Nearby, Ihsan al-Fara, another survivor, spoke of the young lives lost, sharing that her son Issa, only five years old, was killed, and several of her children were injured. The impact of the airstrikes reverberated far beyond the immediate blast sites, and images from Khan Yunis portrayed an endless sequence of heartbreak and devastation.
At the European hospital in Khan Yunis, grief-stricken families gathered to mourn the children lost, their small bodies wrapped in white shrouds. Outside the hospital, relatives stood beside the remnants of the Al-Fara family home, staring into the rubble-filled crater that now marks where the house once stood. Mattresses, broken furniture, and fragments of everyday life lay scattered, stark reminders of the lives disrupted in an instant. Following these strikes, the Israeli military issued a statement claiming that “a number of terrorists were eliminated” as part of their wider operation in southern Gaza. Israel’s offensive, however, has intensified across the northern region in recent weeks, where the military asserts Hamas forces are regrouping.
Since the latest escalation began on October 7, Gaza’s health ministry estimates that 42,847 people have lost their lives, a figure which the United Nations has verified as reliable, underscoring the staggering human cost of the ongoing bombardment. The devastation wrought by the strikes is felt across Gaza, where widespread destruction has left vast portions of the territory in ruins. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, and almost the entire population of 2.4 million has been displaced at least once within the past year, as families flee repeatedly from one area to another in a desperate attempt to avoid the conflict’s encroaching frontlines.
