The bombing of a Gaza apartment building has become a focus of debate over civilian casualties in the Hamas-Israel war. For the people who lived there, it was much more than that.
As Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza City for the sixth night running, Dr. Ayman Abul Ouf climbed the stairs of the apartment block that his family built four decades ago, calmer than he had seemed all day. The Abul Ouf Building, nestled in a wealthy shopping district on Al Wahda Street, was the last place he thought Israel would hit. He returned to his third-floor apartment at half-past midnight, after a 16-hour day running the coronavirus team at Gaza’s biggest hospital. He could hear the bombs, but mainly from the television in his living room. His upscale neighborhood was considered so safe that in wars past relatives from elsewhere in Gaza waited out the bombing in his apartment. In the room next door, his son Tawfiq, a high-school senior, was studying for a science exam. One floor below, Dr. Abul Ouf’s father, a scientist also named Tawfiq, was making a late-night meal. One floor above, his cousin’s daughter, Shaimaa, a dentistry student, was texting her fiancé. Minutes later, they were all dead. At about 1 a.m. on Sunday, May 16, an Israeli airstrike killed 21 of the 38 people in the building that night. A 22nd resident died of her injuries nearly three weeks later. The Israeli military said the target of the strike was not the apartment building but a tunnel under the street in front of it. In a conflict in which both sides are accused of war crimes, the air raid on Al Wahda Street that night stands out for its shocking civilian death toll and for nearly decimating entire families. The attack, which also destroyed another residential building on the street, was the single deadliest episode in the recent 11-day war between Israel and Hamas, killing a total of 44 people. A fragile cease-fire was tested this week after militants sent incendiary balloons into Israel, and Israel responded with airstrikes. But the raid on Al Wahda Street remains emblematic of the debate over whether Israel, in striking what it said were legitimate military targets, could have avoided killing civilians. And to what extent Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, also bears responsibility for burrowing military infrastructure beneath cities. What is not disputed is that the thriving, largely upper-middle class community that inhabited the five-story Abul Ouf Building was destroyed in a flash. The block housed the families of a doctor, a scientist, a waiter, a shopkeeper and a psychologist. For the family that owned it — the Abul Oufs — it embodied 40 years of hopes and aspirations. “There are a lot of memories still there,” said Riad Ishkontana, a 42-year-old waiter who lost his wife and four of their five children. “But the Israeli bombing buried them.” The conflict began a few days earlier, shortly after 6 p.m. on May 10, when Hamas fired a half-dozen rockets toward Jerusalem. Hamas said it was responding to Israeli actions in East Jerusalem, including police raids on the Aqsa Mosque compound and the planned eviction of Palestinian residents — provocations, it said, that demanded a forceful rebuke.
