Father says baby twins killed by Israeli strike in Gaza as he registered births

Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan shows the birth certificates of his twins after learning they were killed in a strike

Newborn twins were reportedly killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza while their father was at a local government office to register their birth.

Asser, a boy, and Ayssel, a girl, were just four days old when their father Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan went to collect their birth certificates.

While he was away, his neighbours called to say their home in Deir al Balah had been bombed.

The strike also killed his wife and the twins' grandmother.

“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I am told it was a shell that hit the house.”

"I didn't even have the time to celebrate them," he added.

Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says 115 infants have been born and then killed during the war.

According to AP news agency, the family had followed an order to evacuate Gaza City in the opening weeks of the Israel-Gaza war, seeking shelter in a central part of the strip, as the Israeli army instructed.

The BBC has asked the Israeli army for comment on the strike, and is waiting for a response.

Israel says it tries to avoid harming civilians and blames their deaths on Hamas operating in dense residential areas, including using civilian buildings as shelter.

But officials rarely comment on individual strikes.

Several such shelters in Gaza have been attacked in the past few weeks.

On Saturday, an Israeli air strike on a school building sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City killed more than 70 people, the director of a hospital told the BBC.

An Israeli military spokesman said the school "served as an active Hamas and Islamic Jihad military facility", which Hamas denied.

Israel disputed the number of dead, but the BBC could not independently verify figures from either side.

Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in an attack on Israel on 7 October, taking 251 others back to Gaza as hostages.

That attack triggered a massive Israeli military offensive on Gaza and the current war.

More than 39,790 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli campaign, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry.

Update 16 August: This article’s headline originally explained that newborn twins were killed in Gaza as their father went to register their birth. It was amended to a longer headline emphasising the fact that their father said they had been killed in an Israeli strike.