In the course of just one month of the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army killed sixty Palestinians, mostly children and women, from the Tabatibi family, in the Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City.
Medical sources said the latest strike took place in the early hours of Friday morning, April 12, 2023, in the densely populated Daraj neighborhood of Gaza City, when an Israeli missile killed at least 25 members of the Tabatibi family, in the five-story building.
On Friday morning, the six-story building, where the Tabatibi family sheltered, was still standing on the narrow street, before the army bombed it, turning it into rubble, killing and wounding everyone inside.
Khaled al-Tabatibi, a survivor of the family, told AFP: “We were sleeping, we didn’t hear any rocket or exchanges of fire or anything.”
“But then, we went downstairs and found my sisters, their sons, and their daughters, all martyred,” he added, “They were severely mutilated; it is a massacre, and we do not even know why Israel targeted the house. We are just an ordinary family, trying to seek shelter and some safety.”
Ziad Dardas, a neighbor of the family told AFP, “All we saw was a rocket exploding in the house with the family inside it.”
All slain and wounded Palestinians were transferred to the Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, which has already been repeatedly bombed by Israel and is partially functioning.
Dardas added that the Tabatibi family has been repeatedly displaced since October 7, and were just trying to seek safety, a concept that does not exist in the coastal enclave.
Many members of the family were killed on March 15, when they gathered in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza for iftar, but Israel bombed the house, and the gathering quickly turned into a bloodbath.
Witnesses said at the time that an Israeli airstrike hit the building where they were preparing the suhoor meals after a fasting day of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, killing 36 family members.
Mohammed Tabatibi said at the time at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in nearby Deir Al-Balah before the bodies of his relatives were taken for burial: “This is my mother, this is my father, this is my aunt, these are my brothers… They bombed the house while we were in it. My mother and aunt were preparing food… I don’t know why they bombed the house and massacred my family.”
On Sunday, medical sources announced on Saturday that the death toll in the Gaza Strip has risen to 33,686, the majority of whom are children and women, since the start of the Israeli occupation onslaught on October 7, 2023.
The sources added that the toll of injuries has risen to 76,309 since the start of the aggression, while thousands of victims are still under the rubble.
