Asser and Ayssel were born into the war and were killed by the war. Two twins, united in life and in death, which came just 72 hours after birth. An existence that lasted a breath, torn away by a whirlpool of violence that seems to know no end in Gaza. So much so that the father did not even have time to collect their birth certificates before receiving the phone call in which he discovered that an Israeli raid had destroyed his home and his life, taking away his children, his wife and his mother-in-law. The tragedy occurred in Deir al Balah, in the center of the Strip. The mother, Joumana Arafa, was a pharmacist and had given birth over the weekend, announcing on Facebook the birth of two twins, a boy named Asser and a girl, Ayssel.
On Tuesday, the father, Mohammed Abu al-Qumssan, had gone to register the two children at a local government office. But while he was there, his neighbors called to tell him that their house had been bombed and that his family was dead.. “They told me it was a grenade that hit the house,” he said. “I didn’t even have time to celebrate them.” The man’s desperation at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, captured in footage that bounced around social media, went viral, moving the world and sparking outrage, so much so that a journalist asked the US State Department spokesman about the incident. Now Mohammed is like a ghost, in front of the blue tent where he found refuge in al-Mawasi, on the coast. “I still had the documents in my hand, I wanted to show them to my wife.
They told me: ‘You’ll find her at the morgue’,” he tells Agence France Presse in Gaza. “I wanted to tell her that I had written the children’s names correctly, Asser and Ayssel,” he continues, his face streaked with tears. “I couldn’t even see the bodies.” As he speaks, he holds a pile of unused layettes, bought with his wife during her pregnancy: a yellow bodysuit decorated with white daisies – “we got it when we came back from a doctor’s visit” – and another pink one. From a bag, he also takes out a half-full package of diapers. “We had a hard time finding them, we had been trying to buy them for three months,” he explains: in the Strip, everything is missing, and milk and diapers are now bought at a high price. When he married Joumana, on July 20, 2023, the Gaza Strip was experiencing a quiet summer. The young couple had a dream: to have children. And despite everything, the war had not made them give up. “I was always afraid that my wife would miscarry because she was constantly going from one place to another,” he says. In the end, a bomb took everything away. And today, in front of his tent, Mohammed looks in disbelief at his children’s birth certificates, which one day he will have to have modified to add the date of death.