After a two-month truce, Israel resumed bombing in mid-March, destroying buildings like this one in central Gaza City, in March. Photo / Saher Alghorra, The New York Times
The Abu Teirs thought the Israel-Hamas cease-fire might mean they could start to rebuild their lives. But a new round of Israeli airstrikes dashed those dreams.
There were times, before Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip shattered the 2-month-old ceasefire on March 18, when Huda Abu Teir and her family could almost believe things might go back to normal.
After fleeing from their home to a shelter for displaced people, and then to a tent, another shelter and on to another encampment during 15 months of war – six or seven displacements in all – they had returned to their house in Abasan al-Kabira, in southeastern Gaza, where they lived with Huda’s grandparents and uncles.
Back at home a few weeks ago, Huda, 19, threw a pizza party for her cousins, said one cousin, Fatma al-Shawwaf, 20. The other girls teased Huda: shouldn’t you be studying? Huda, who was set on becoming a nurse, always seemed to be studying. But Huda laughingly retorted that she liked having fun, too.
The day before Israeli airstrikes resumed, Huda asked her uncle Nour, who taught technology, if he could help her go over the material for her high school exams. He promised her a study session the next evening, he said.
But around midnight, Huda’s brother Abdullah, 15, heard an explosion. “What was that?” he screamed to his father, who had no time to answer before the next blast, this time over their heads and under their feet all at once.
Abdullah was sent flying on to a neighbour’s roof, he said. Pieces of the house he had grown up in smouldered around him. He felt a sharp pain in his right eye and couldn’t see much. He could only scream: “I’m here! Can you hear me?”
Startled awake by the explosions and the screaming, a cousin who lived nearby, Qasim, 35, sprinted down the street through the dark. The four-storey house that Huda and Abdullah’s grandparents had built nearly three decades ago had all but collapsed, he said, the upper floors sandwiched flat atop the lower ones.
Using his phone as a flashlight, Qasim stepped inside and saw Huda’s grandmother, Shawqia, 63, lying in the rubble, bleeding. She was not moving.
Others who lived there had been flung outside by the force of the blast, Qasim said. Everywhere, people were bleeding from their noses or ears.
Huda was one of the eight killed, with her parents: Asmaa, 35, who had taken care of all the Abu Teirs whenever Shawqia went to Egypt for thyroid cancer treatment, and Mohammed, 42, who worked as a security officer at the Rafah border crossing for the Hamas-led Government, relatives said.
Huda’s cousin Anas, 13, was breathing when they found him. But an ambulance didn’t arrive for nearly an hour, Qasim said.
Anas died waiting. His two younger sisters, Jana, 11, and Leen, 6, and his mother, Fulla Abu Teir, 29, were also killed.
Shawqia was dead, too. Her husband, Suleiman, had died early in the war, relatives said, when his heart condition flared up after a nearby airstrike.
“We never thought such massive attacks would happen again,” Qasim said two days later at the European Gaza Hospital near Khan Younis. “We thought the fighting had exhausted both sides, and that war wouldn’t start again.”
The Israeli military said that it had targeted a Hamas operative who “stayed inside a building” on March 18, but did not identify the person or specify whether it meant the Abu Teirs’ home. Family members said there was no reason they would have been targeted.
Gaza has resumed counting its daily dead. The Israeli airstrikes that night killed more than 400 people, and barrages since then have killed about 600 more, the Gaza Health Ministry said. The ministry’s figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, though Hamas publicly announced the deaths of several senior officials in last month’s initial attacks.
Israel said it had renewed airstrikes on Hamas sites and operatives to force the group to release more Israeli hostages after Hamas rejected new Israeli demands.
A New York Times investigation found that the Israeli military has loosened its rules around how many civilians it can endanger with each airstrike in pursuit of Hamas fighters, who Israel says are embedded among civilians.
On Wednesday, the Israeli Defence Minister, Israel Katz, announced it would expand its military offensive in Gaza, adding to the threats looming over the population there.
In all, Gaza health officials say, more than 50,000 people have been killed since the war began in October 2023, after a Hamas-led attack on Israel that killed about 1200 people and took about 250 more captive. Israel’s response has crushed entire families, whole neighbourhoods, Gaza’s healthcare system, its educational institutions, its infrastructure and most of its economy.
Abdullah, Huda’s 15-year-old brother, knew little of what happened that night two weeks ago. After the airstrike, he managed to push aside the broken water tank and heating panel he was trapped under before blacking out, he said two days later. He woke up in the hospital, pain singeing both eyes, his vision still blurry.
Nobody had told him yet that Huda was dead, or his parents, or that his brother Maher was in intensive care.
Abdullah was the third of five. His father had fallen for his mother, a cousin, when they were still teenagers. In a society where most marriages are arranged, relatives remarked on Mohammed and Asmaa’s visible tenderness toward each other, Qasim, a cousin, said.
Family was everything. Mohammed always threw big birthday parties for the children. And when one of Mohammed’s sisters, also called Huda, was recovering from a C-section, Asmaa bathed and cooked for her as if she were her own sister, the sister recalled.
Qasim remembered Mohammed bursting with pride when his eldest daughter, Bayan, got married. He jokingly asked Huda if she wanted to get married next, even before graduating, as some Gaza girls did.
Huda flew into a rage, her sister Amira remembered. She was the kind of kid who doodled “Nurse Huda in the future” in her notebooks. She loved weddings, and shopping, too – for skin care, for stylish dresses. But marriage could wait.
Their grandmother was more traditional. Shawqia was the backbone of the family, dispensing home-cooked food and help whenever anyone needed it and relying on her faith for strength, her family said.
Before the war, the family looked forward every year to the day before Ramadan, when Shawqia would invite everyone over for a giant meal in the garden before they began their daily fasts for the holy month. Maftoul, a Palestinian couscous dish, was her specialty, her family recalled: no one else was allowed to make it or fiddle with the spices she put in it.
When the Abu Teirs were sheltering in the southern city of Rafah early last year, Shawqia made a daily habit of visiting every son and daughter’s family in their respective tents to check in, her daughter Huda said. She sat and helped her grandchildren memorise verses of the Quran, feeding them dates and cookies.
At one point during the war, the Abu Teirs took refuge with another family in central Gaza. Grateful, Shawqia’s husband, Suleiman, promised to repay them when peace returned, their son Nour said.
Suleiman died shortly after. But Shawqia remembered their promise.
Last month, she made several batches of maftoul and asked one of her sons to deliver them to the family who had hosted them. She was killed a week later.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair
Photographs by: Saher Alghorra
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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