RENNES, France: When Israeli air strikes hit his neighborhood early on in the Gaza war, Palestinian social worker Tareq Abu Eita, 42, saw his whole life upended in seconds.
The bombardment on Oct. 14 blew in the walls of his two-story family home.
It killed his 77-year-old father Hamed, his wife of 15 years Muntaha, 37, and his 11-year-old son Ilyas.
It also took the lives of his two nieces, eight-year-old Mira and 14-year-old Tala.
“It’s all gone,” said Abu Eita, a tear streaming down his cheek in the French city of Rennes, after showing AFP pictures of his wedding and late son grinning on his phone.
He and another son, 14-year-old Fares, are among just a handful of Palestinians wounded in the war who have been flown over to France for specialized medical treatment.
The latest Gaza war started after Hamas on Oct, 7 attacked Israel, which resulted in the death of 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli figures.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 39,550 people, according to health authorities in the territory, which does not provide detail of civilian and militant deaths.
“It’s not just numbers,” said Abu Eita.
“Every one of these human beings had their loved ones, their family, their memories.”
He and his son Fares were outside their home in the northern Jabalia refugee camp after receiving a water delivery when the strikes hit, and were both badly wounded.
Fares suffered a large skull fracture that plunged him into a coma for more than three weeks.
Nine months on, with Israeli forces still pounding the ravaged Gaza Strip, both are recovering in France following extensive medical care.
But Abu Eita is terrified he could now also lose two other sons he was forced to leave behind without a mother in the besieged territory: 10-year-old Jud and 15-year-old Ahmad.
“It’ll be a disaster if anything happens to them,” the father said.
“I really couldn’t cope.”
Abu Eita says he has been promised that as soon as he is granted asylum, he will be able to apply to bring his children to France.
But he is still waiting, leaving him with too much time to agonize about the impossible choice he made.
“Fares was dying. If I had stayed, I would have lost him,” he said.
Israel’s offensive has wounded more than 91,000 people since Oct. 7, the Gaza authorities say.
Among these, around 10 children in Gaza every day lose one or both legs, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees says.
Aspiring soccer player Asef Abu Mhadi, 12, is one of them.
He says he was playing football outside his home in the central Nuseirat refugee camp on Oct. 16 when his neighborhood was hit, reducing it to rubble.
“I thought there was debris on my leg,” he said, sitting in a wheelchair with a Palestinian football scarf over his shoulder near a Paris suburb hospital.
“I sat up to remove it and I discovered my leg was severed.”
Asef was also flown to France for treatment with his mother Raja Abdulkarim Abu Mhadi.
But Abu Mhadi, a 47-year-old who lost her husband when Asef was an infant, was not allowed to bring her other five children — Enas, 13, Aisha, 15, Ahmad, 17, Moayed, 18, and Mohammed, 20.
The mother, who says she has lost three nephews in the war, is also wracked with worry as she waits.
