More than 100 members of one Gaza clan have been killed in war
Conflict leaves many family trees without branches
CAIRO — People whispered that Nasser al-Astal had come undone, dazed by grief. Weeks after the Israeli airstrike that he said had crashed into his family’s home, his words came in loud, quivering spurts, darting frantically from memory to memory, from loss to loss — his wife, two of their sons, and four of their daughters, all dead.
A daughter-in-law and a sonin-law, dead. His older brother and his family, dead. His first grandchild, dead, he said, his second never born: His elder son’s wife had been pregnant.
“When I look at photos of my family on my phone, I cry to myself at night,” al-Astal said in a phone interview a few weeks after his loss. “But men hide their tears, so I try to do it away from people, alone.”
All of their names were there in black and white on a list of 6,747 Palestinians who health officials in the Gaza Strip said had been killed by Israeli attacks in the first 19 days of the war. No. 14: his wife, Marwa al-Astal, 48. No. 84: their granddaughter, 1, also named Marwa.
The first 88 people on the list were all from the extended al-Astal family. The next 72 were Hassounas. The next 65 al-Najjars. The next 60 al-Masrys. The next 49 al-Kurds.
Such numbers capture the magnitude of Gaza’s loss like little else: family trees dismembered, whole branches of them obliterated.
It has been almost two months since the list was released Oct. 26, and the death toll given by Gaza’s Health Ministry has nearly tripled, approaching 20,000.
A ministry spokesperson, Ashraf al-Qudra, said early last month that more than 100 people in the Astal family had been killed in Israeli attacks. Of 88 family members on the Oct. 26 list, 39 were identified as children and 25 as women.
Israel’s war in Gaza is killing women and children at a faster pace than in almost any other conflict in the world this century.
A few of the family’s dead were linked to Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that has ruled Gaza for 16 years and that led the Oct. 7 attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, according to Israeli officials.
One family member, Hamdan al-Astal, appears to have been among those who attacked Israel. He was not on the Oct. 26 list, but Palestinian news media in Gaza reported his death the day after the assault, saying he had participated.
Another family member who survived, Yunis al-Astal, is a longtime Hamas lawmaker and firebrand sheikh who has compared Jews to bacteria and apes and said it was justifiable to “wipe them out of existence.”
Ten days after Hamdan al-Astal’s death was reported, family members buried Ramzi al-Astal, also identified in Palestinian news media as a Hamas fighter.
Relatives and local news media said he was killed when an Israeli airstrike leveled his home, along with his wife and sons Muhammad, 17, and Karim, 11. One of Ramzi’s brothers and at least five nieces and nephews, the youngest 9, were on the list.
They were just some of the thousands of civilians who have become casualties of Israel’s campaign to eradicate Hamas, family members said.
“If you want to assassinate him, assassinate him alone,” said Sami al-Astal, a distant relation, referring to Ramzi al-Astal. “If you want to assassinate him, why did you do it with his children and his family while they were at home?”
Sami al-Astal, a humanities dean at Al Aqsa University in Khan Younis, the southern Gaza city where much of his extended family lives, said some relatives supported Hamas, while others supported other Palestinian political factions or none at all. Some were plumbers or doctors — ordinary citizens.
He was for peace, he said, and opposed killing any civilians.
In Gaza, civilians have virtually no safe places to hide or ways to escape. The density of the land, where extended families often live together in multistory buildings and have crowded in even more for shelter during the war, turbocharges the potential civilian toll of many airstrikes. It also makes it difficult to separate combatants from civilians, and Israel accuses Hamas of intentionally placing members in or near hospitals, schools, and homes.
Hamas is “unlawfully embedding their military assets in densely populated civilian areas, showing blatant disregard for the civilians in Gaza by using them as human shields,” said Nir Dinar, an Israeli military spokesperson.
But human rights advocates, many governments, and a growing number of experts say that Israel may be violating international laws against putting civilians at “excessive” risk, laws that require it to do its utmost to protect noncombatants.
In addition to the deaths from the fighting, disease, too, is beginning to stalk survivors.
The World Health Organization warns that “worrying signals of epidemic diseases” are emerging.
Staph infections, chickenpox, rashes, urinary tract infections, meningitis, mumps, scabies, measles, and food poisoning all are rising, the Gaza Health Ministry and individual doctors say. The WHO is particularly concerned about bloody diarrhea, jaundice, and respiratory infections. The United Nations is tracking 14 diseases with “epidemic potential,’’ Reuters reported.
“The risk is expected to worsen with the deteriorating situation and approaching winter conditions,’’ the WHO said in a statement.