Horror after strike kills family

Khalil al-Dallu screams. “They said Mohammed was alive!” he shouts as emergency workers pull a man’s body from a Gaza City home levelled by an Israeli strike yesterday.

His face quickly crumples into tears as the emergency staff tell him that his cousin is in fact dead – one of six members of the Dallu family killed when an Israeli missile struck the Nasser neighbourhood, flattening the three-story building where they lived.

“The whole family is martyred!” he cries, as the body of 35-year-old Mohammed al-Dallu is placed in an ambulance.

“What was the sin of the children and the infants, Israel?” he screams, raising his hands to the sky.

The emergency workers carry on with their grim task. By the time their work is done they have pulled 11 bodies from the flattened building and others around it.

The body of Mohammed’s wife is also retrieved, as well as those of five of their children. The body of another female family member is pulled out, although she is not immediately identified.

The strike also killed two neighbours from the Muzzana family.

Mohammed’s father, Jamal, and his 17-year-old son Abdullah are among the survivors.

When the Israeli strike happened, they were out buying food to boost the family’s stocks because they feared an Israeli ground invasion.

Jamal leans on a bloody electricity pole for support, overwhelmed at the horror and loss in front of him, his relatives crowding around as pieces of his grandchildren are plucked from their former home.

Near-hysterical with anger and sorrow, Ibrahim shouts: “Don’t tell his brother Abdullah, the trauma will kill him!”

The brother, 26-year-old Abdullah, is currently studying in Turkey to become a doctor.

Two of the bodies are retrieved as night falls, after two diggers squeeze into the narrow alley leading to the site and remove the roof of one of the houses flattened in the strike.

“I don’t even know how they can get all the bodies out without specialised rescue equipment,” says Majdi Abdul Mejid, a neighbour, shaking his head.

Ahmed Hato, 13, is still dazed by the sudden death.

“I was playing with the sons of the neighbours at the entrance to the street. There was a huge explosion, the earth shook and dust and rocks went everywhere. I don’t know how, but I ended up on the ground and without injuries,” he says.

Ahmed’s father can not watch the rescue efforts, and does not answer his phone. Instead he cries openly for Mohammed, whom he saw just an hour before the strike.

Mohammed, a Hamas police officer, “was a good man, moral and kind to everyone,” he says.

“Everyone loved him. His death is a huge loss for the family.”

There is panic in the air but eventually the rescue workers finish their mission, placing the bodies into emergency vehicles for transport to the Shifa hospital morgue, the blood on their clothes not yet dry.