GAZA, May 24, 2025 (WAFA) – As the sun rose over Gaza on a Friday morning, Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar, a doctor at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, kissed her ten children goodbye and left for work, unaware it would be the last time she would see them alive.
Just hours later, as she bent over wounded children — the survivors of relentless Israeli airstrikes — the charred and dismembered bodies of her own children were being transferred one by one to the hospital’s morgue.
The irony was unbearable: the doctor who had spent months saving Gaza’s children amid an ongoing Israeli campaign of extermination could do nothing to save her own. An Israeli missile, part of a so-called “precision” targeting system, struck her home in the Qizan Al-Najjar neighborhood east of Khan Younis. It killed all ten of her children — the youngest only six months old — along with her husband, Dr. Hamdi Al-Najjar.
The missile did not simply kill. It burned, shattered, and erased. Some bodies arrived without heads. Others were beyond recognition. Dr. Alaa, who had kept Gaza’s children breathing through pain and rubble, now stood helpless before the remains of her own family.
“The bomb knew who was inside”
According to Dr. Suheir Al-Najjar, niece of the late Dr. Hamdi and herself a physician, the Israeli military first fired a missile that failed to detonate. Minutes later, a second, deadly strike followed — flattening the house without warning.
“They knew,” she said, choking back tears in an interview with Anadolu. “They knew that inside were ten children and two doctors. They knew, and they did it anyway.”
The surviving child, gravely injured, now lies in intensive care with his father. Whether he is aware of his siblings’ deaths is uncertain. Whether he will survive is equally unknown.
The Israeli military, which claims to use advanced surveillance and targeting technologies, had the capacity to identify every person in that home. The strike came just three days after far-right Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin publicly called for the elimination of Gaza’s children. “Every child, every infant in Gaza is an enemy,” Feiglin told Israel’s Channel 14.
The Al-Najjar family’s destruction now stands as a chilling embodiment of that rhetoric turned reality.
"We couldn't even kiss them goodbye"
At Nasser Medical Complex, where Dr. Alaa has treated countless children wounded in the war, her own grief now hangs heavy in the corridors. “The bodies were so badly burned, so torn apart,” Dr. Suheir said. “We couldn’t even say goodbye. We couldn’t kiss their foreheads.”
Seven of the ten children's bodies were recovered from the rubble. Two remained trapped beneath what was once a home. Emergency crews did what they could, but the destruction was near total.
This family’s tragedy is far from isolated. Gaza is enduring what 80 countries described in a joint statement to the United Nations as “the worst humanitarian crisis” since Israel's genocide began on October 7, 2023. More than 176,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured, the majority of them women and children. Over 11,000 remain missing.
The face of loss, the voice of Gaza
Dr. Alaa Al-Najjar has become, unwillingly, the face of that loss. Her personal story, marked by selfless service and unimaginable grief, is one of thousands — but it resonates with brutal clarity.
She is a healer who could not heal her own. A mother who could not hold her children one last time. A witness to Gaza’s pain, now bearing its deepest scars.
--
M.N
