A BABY girl has been rescued from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Gaza after her parents were killed an Israeli air strike.
As rescuers dug through the remains of the building in Khan Younis on Thursday, they could hear the cries of a baby underneath the rubble.
Suddenly, calls of “God is great” rang out. A man sprinted away from the wreckage carrying a living infant swaddled in a blanket and handed her to a waiting ambulance crew. The baby girl stirred fitfully as paramedics checked her over.
Her parents and brother were killed in the overnight Israeli strike.
“When we asked people, they said she is a month old and she has been under the rubble since dawn,” said Hazen Attar, a civil defence first responder.
“She had been screaming and then falling silent from time to time until we were able to get her out a short while ago, and thank God she is safe.”
The girl was identified as Ella Osama Abu Dagga. She had been born 25 days earlier in the midst of a tenuous ceasefire that many Palestinians in Gaza had hoped would mark the end of Israel's war on Gaza, which has killed nearly 40,000 people and displaced nearly the entire population of Gaza.
Only the girl’s grandparents survived the attack. Her mother, father and brother were killed, along with another family including a father and his seven children.
Rescuers digging through the rubble could be seen pulling out the small body of a child sprawled on the mattress where he had been sleeping.
The girl’s grandmother, Fatima Abu Dagga, sat with a group of other women in a relative’s house on Thursday, taking turns cradling the infant.
Her sons and their wives and eight grandchildren died in the bombing, and only the baby survived. She wept over the loss and the return to the devastation of war.
“We weren’t really living in a truce,” she said.
“We knew that at any moment the war might return. We never felt that there was stability, not at all.”
It comes as Israel resumed heavy strikes across Gaza on Tuesday, shattering a ceasefire that had halted the war and facilitated the release of more than two dozen hostages.
Israel blamed the renewed fighting on Hamas because the militant group rejected a new proposal that departed from their signed agreement.
Overnight on Wednesday and into Thursday, Israeli strikes killed at least 58 Palestinians across the Gaza Strip overnight and into Thursday, according to three hospitals.
The strikes hit multiple homes in the middle of the night, killing men, women and children as they slept.
Since Tuesday, Gaza's health ministry said nearly 600 people have been killed, most of whom were women and children.
