Nine young children were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit the home of a doctor in Gaza, a hospital has said.
Only one of Dr Alaa al-Najjar’s 10 children is said to have survived the missile strike on their home near Khan Younis in southern Gaza on Friday.
Graeme Groom, a British surgeon working in the hospital, said he had operated on Dr Najjar’s surviving 11-year-old son, who was injured along with his father.
Dr Najjar, a paediatrician at al-Tahrir Clinic in the Nasser Medical Complex, was reportedly at work when nine of her children, who ranged in age from seven months to 12 years old, were killed.
She ran home to find her family’s house on fire, Ahmad al-Farra, head of the hospital’s pediatric department, told the Associated Press.
Horrifying footage shared by the Hamas-run Palestinian Civil Defence shows the bodies of at least seven small children being pulled from the rubble. Dr Najjar’s husband, Hamdi, who is also a doctor, is shown being put on a stretcher and carried to an ambulance.
It comes after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had struck more than 100 targets across Gaza over the past day.
An IDF spokesperson said: “Yesterday (Friday), an IDF aircraft struck a number of suspects who were identified operating from a structure adjacent to IDF troops in the area of Khan Yunis.
The Khan Yunis area is a dangerous war zone. Before beginning operations there, the IDF evacuated civilians from this area for their own safety.
“The claim regarding harm to uninvolved civilians is under review.”
According to Dr Muneer Alboursh, the director general of Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry, the missile hit shortly after the doctor’s husband had returned home from dropping her at work.
“This is the reality our medical staff in Gaza endure,” he wrote in a post on X (Twitter).
“Words fall short in describing the pain. In Gaza, it is not only healthcare workers who are targeted – Israel’s aggression goes further, wiping out entire families.”
Two British doctors working at Nasser Hospital described the attack as “horrific” and “unimaginable” for Dr Najjar.
In a video diary posted on social media, Dr Groom said Dr Najjar’s 11-year-old son was his last patient of the day on Friday. The boy was injured and “seemed much younger as we lifted him onto the operating table”, he said.
Dr Groom added: “It is unimaginable for that poor woman. Both of them are doctors here.
“The father was a physician at Nasser Hospital. He had no political and no military connections. He doesn’t seem to be prominent on social media, and yet his poor wife is the only uninjured one, who has the prospect of losing her husband.”
The bodies of 79 people killed by Israeli strikes have been taken to hospitals in the past 24 hours, Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday – a toll that does not include hospitals in the battered north, which it said were now inaccessible.
The health ministry said the new deaths took the war’s toll to 53,901 since the Hamas-led attack on 7 October 2023 that sparked the 19 months of fighting.
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