ABNA24 - All members of a family in the Gaza Strip were killed in Israeli airstrike hours after they celebrated their son’s completion of memorizing the Holy Quran.
Israeli terrorists erased the Palestinian family entirely from the civil registry when they bombed Al-Masri family’s home in central Gaza City early Tuesday morning.
Hours earlier, Feras Al-Masri, his wife, Salsabil, and their children had celebrated the completion of their eldest son Naeem’s (13) Quran memorization with sweets and congratulatory messages before the Israelis, at 2.45 am, in continuation of their ongoing genocidal war in the Gaza Strip, incinerated all six surviving members of the family as they slept.
“We all woke up terrified from our sleep — my wife, my children, and I,” Muhammad Al-Masri, Feras’s brother, who lived in the same building, told Ultra Palestine. “We tried to flee to the street, but the smoke was very thick, and the fire spread quickly, so we began screaming and calling for help until the neighbors managed to place a ladder at the window and get us out to the street.”
Initially, Muhammad was unaware that the explosion had struck the neighboring apartment housing his brother’s family and their four children.
“As soon as I reached outside, I began hearing the screams of my brother’s children and his wife,” he recounted. “We could hear them clearly as they cried for help: Save us… the fire has reached us… get us out of the house before we burn.”
“Their cries for help continued for several minutes, and I could see the movement of their hands through one of the windows. It was the hardest moment of my life. Its details have never left me.”
The neighbors tried to rescue the family by climbing the stairs, but the intensity of the fire prevented them from doing so. A subsequent gas cylinder explosion in the apartment further intensified the flames and put paid to the rescue efforts.
“At that moment, I realized they had all been martyred, and I collapsed to the ground from the shock,” Muhammad said.
According to the latest data from the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 39,000 Palestinian families have been directly targeted since the start of the livestreamed Israeli genocide in October 2023, including more than 2,700 families that were completely wiped out after all of their members were martyred. More than 6,020 families have only one survivor.
Just hours before the martyrdom of the entire family, the scene at the Al-Masri home was one of joy and celebration. “The family gathered to celebrate Naeem’s completion of the memorization the Holy Quran,” Muhammad recounted, as he told the story of Feras’s optimism despite the Western-backed Israeli barbarism he had lived through for nearly three years.
“We ate sweets and presented gifts to Feras, and he was extremely happy. After that, we began talking about people’s conditions and the difficult circumstances we are living through because of the war, but he always repeated that God’s relief was near, and that this reality could not continue. He was the most optimistic among us despite everything.”
Both Feras and his wife, Salsabil, were religiously devout and were memorizers of the Quran. Muhammad told Ultra Palestine that Salsabil also worked as a teacher and helped others memorize the Quran, while their son Naeem had completed the memorization of the holy book. He had recited five juz’ (portions) that day before he was martyred. As for his sisters, Faryal (10), Salma (7), and Ameera (5), they had also memorized portions of the Quran and were following the same path.
Academic excellence ran in the family, and the children were fond of drawing. Muhammad revealed: “All of my brother’s children were top students in their schools, and at the end of every school term they would return carrying certificates of appreciation. Whenever I asked them, ‘What gift do you want?’ they would ask for coloring supplies and drawing notebooks, because they loved drawing very much.”
Israeli savagery reduced the thriving family — which had remained optimistic and continued to excel despite enduring an ongoing genocidal war and all the deprivations it had brought for nearly three years — to charred, unrecognizable remains. When the civil defense crews finally managed to enter the apartment after hours of effort, they were greeted by shocking scenes.
“Their bodies were completely burned, and we could not even look at them or bid them farewell as the civil defense crews recovered their bodies,” Muhammad recounted.
Like nearly every family in the Gaza Strip, Al-Masri family had already experienced tragedy earlier in the genocidal Israeli assault. Muhammad revealed that another brother’s wife and her little daughter had been martyred in an Israeli airstrike several months earlier. One of Feras’s sons had also been martyred in the same bombardment, and at dawn on Tuesday the family joined their fifth child.
“What sin did these children commit that they should die burned while they were asleep?” Muhammad cried out. “In what religion or law does this happen — that an entire family is erased from the civil registry while the world watches and says nothing?”
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