‘My children, my children’: The Gaza family killed minutes before ceasefire

Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Palestine – The ceasefire in Gaza was supposed to start at 8.30am (06: 30 GMT). The al-Qidra family had endured 15 months of Israeli attacks. They were residing in a tent and had previously been displaced. One of the over 46,900 Palestinians who were killed by Israel included their relatives.

But the al-Qidras had survived. And they desired to return home.

Ahmed al-Qidra traveled to eastern Khan Younis with his seven children on a donkey cart. The bombing should have stopped when it was finally safe to travel.

The family was unaware that Israel and Hamas’ ceasefire had been postponed. They were unaware that Israeli aircraft were still flying over Gaza’s skies and prepared to drop their bombs during those extra hours.

The explosion was loud. Ahmed’s wife Hanan heard it. She had stayed behind at a relative’s home in the centre of the city, organising their belongings, planning on joining her husband and children a few hours later.

“The blast felt like it hit my heart”, Hanan said. She had just spoken goodbye to her children, who she had only just passed away from.

“My children, my children”! she screamed.

The cart had been hit. Hanan’s eldest son, 16-year-old Adly, was dead. So was her youngest, six-year-old Sama, the baby of the family.

Yasmin, 12, explained that a four-wheel drive was in front of the cart carrying people celebrating the ceasefire. The missile may have struck because of this.

“I saw Sama and Adly lying on the ground, and my father bleeding and unconscious on the cart”, Yasmin said. A second missile struck the spot where her eight-year-old sister Aseel was when she pulled her out. Eleven-year-old Mohammed also survived.

But Ahmed, Hanan’s partner in life, was pronounced dead in the hospital.

[Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera] The vehicle that was ahead of the al-Qidras’ donkey cart may have been targeted in the Israeli airstrikes.

My world was made up of my children.

Sitting on the edge of her injured daughter Iman’s hospital bed in Khan Younis’s Nasser Hospital, Hanan was still shell-shocked.

“Where was the ceasefire”? she asked. The family missed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement that Hamas had not provided the names of the three Israeli captives who would be released on Sunday as part of the ceasefire agreement in their excitement of finally returning to their home.

They had not seen Hamas explain that the names would eventually be released and that there were technical reasons for the delay.

They wouldn’t know that three members of their family would die during the three-hour delay before the ceasefire actually started. They were among the 19 Palestinians killed by Israel in those last few hours, according to Gaza’s Civil Defence.

Hanan al-Qidra sits with a daughter, her other daughter lays on hospital bed — After her husband Ahmed was killed in the Israeli attack in Khan Younis on January 19 [Abdelhakim Abu Riash/Al Jazeera], Hanan al-Qidra must take charge of her last two children on her own.

Hanan broke down in tears. Without her husband and two of her children, she would now have to deal with life. The loss of Sama, “the last of the bunch” as she described her with the Arabic saying, was particularly hard.

“Sama was my youngest and the most spoiled. Every time I discussed having a second child, she would become enraged.

Adly had been her “pillar of support”. Her children were her world.

“We endured this entire war, facing the harshest conditions of displacement and bombardment”, Hanan said. “My children dealt with hunger, a lack of food and basic necessities”.

“We fought through this war for more than a year, only to have them die in its final moments. How can this happen”?

A day of joy had been turned into a nightmare. The family had already celebrated the war’s conclusion the night before.

“The Israeli army hasn’t had enough of our blood and the atrocities they’ve been committed for 15 months,” the question becomes. Hanan asked.