Sunday Times: Entire generations were wiped out in Gaza within days

The Sunday Times published stories of Palestinian families, some of whom were exterminated, while others lost many individuals since the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip began.

The Sunday Times newspaper said that at least more than 1,800 families lost a number of their members, according to the authorities in Gaza, and that some of them were completely annihilated and their names were removed from the government civil registry.

The Sunday Times explained that 3 generations of one family were martyred within days, and that entire families were dying as a result of the ongoing war in Gaza.

It stated in its report that it collected and reviewed the details of more than 150 families who lost many of their members in the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, in cooperation with the British non-governmental organization “Air Wars”.

This organization monitors and evaluates civilian damage resulting from military air operations, and counts civilian casualties in conflicts around the world.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, the number of martyrs in the Strip exceeded 32,000 last week, including more than 13,000 children and 9,000 women, and 8,000 others were considered missing.

The Air Wars organization identified 1,391 people belonging to 161 families that lost more than two members.

It did this by tracking death records related to each death, and open sources such as witness testimonies in news reports and obituaries posted by relatives on social media sites.

Among these families is the al Rayes family, as the Sunday Times reported the story of one of its sons, Maysarah al Rayes, who had reached 30 years of age when he completed his studies in medicine at King’s College in London, benefiting from a “Chvening” scholarship offered by the British Foreign Office with funding, full for outstanding international students to undertake a Master’s degree at any UK university.

When Maysarah al Rayes returned to Gaza last summer to work with Doctors Without Borders, he married his colleague Laura Hayek.

Maysara appeared in a post on social media on September 12, taking a selfie with British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly in honor of a meeting with other scholars to which they were invited to discuss the aspirations of Palestinian youth and the challenges they face.

Two months after that occasion, Maysara and his entire family were killed.

The al Rayes family is one of the families that were completely wiped out of existence.

According to the Sunday Times, three generations of the al Rayes family lived in an apartment in one of the residential buildings on the quiet Industry Street in Gaza City.

On the night of last November 5, while Maysara, his parents, sisters, nieces and nephews were fast asleep, two missiles hit the building.

His brother, Muayad, was watching from a nearby building as the 7-storey building where his family lived collapsed.

The Sunday Times said, that 11 members of the al Rayes family died, including Maysara himself, his father and mother, his sisters Oraib and Azza, and her three young sons, and it’s believed that his wife survived.

While Muayyad and Muhammad, Maysara’s brothers, and their cousin Fares were digging through the rubble for hours in search of their family, a second missile fell and killed them all.

The Chevening Scholarship Program said it was devastated to learn of Maisarah al Rayes’s death, and offered its condolences to those of his surviving family.

The Rayes family wasn’t the only one who suffered misfortune.

According to the British newspaper, some families used to sleep together under one roof if their home was bombed so that no one would have to live with the enormity of losing loved ones.

The Sunday Times quoted the Palestinian Ambassador to Britain, Hossam Zomlot, on his X account, confirming that the photo that appeared on the Internet last February 12 of the body of a young girl hanging from a fence in Rafah, is that of his cousin, Sidra Hassouna, who is 7 years old.

He said that the explosion of the Israeli missile was so powerful that it threw her away.

Sidra was killed alongside her twin sister Susan, her brother who wasn’t more than 15 months old, her parents, her uncle Hammoud, her grandmother, and her grandfather.

The British newspaper reported on the authority of Ibrahim Hassouna (25), the only surviving member of his family, that when he arrived at their house to remove the rubble, he saw what he never wanted to see.

“I saw the remains of my entire family, their clothes torn, blood, destruction, stones and dust… I found my mother’s ring on the wall, melted”.

He added, “Now I no longer have a family, and I won’t be able to live without them… I lost the most beautiful thing in my life”.