DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip: The dead Palestinian toddler’s limbs were pale and cold despite the sweltering summer heat in Gaza. Outside the hospital, his father cradled the boy in his arms, unable or unwilling to say goodbye. Flies circled and landed in the child’s soft hair.
“What did he do wrong, my God? What did he do wrong?” screamed Mahmoud Mikdad, his voice hoarse, lifting his face toward the sky.
His son, Yamam, was killed by an Israeli airstrike. Israeli strikes killed more than 60 Palestinians in southern and central Gaza from Monday night into Tuesday, according to hospital records and health officials. Israel has said it is pursuing Hamas militants who are hiding among civilians after offensives uprooted underground tunnel networks.
It had been a regular afternoon for Mikdad. He put his daughter and Yamam down for a nap in the apartment where the displaced family was sheltering.
The strike killed the boy instantly. He wasn’t yet 2 years old.
Mikdad carried Yamam’s body through central Gaza from Nuseirat camp to Al Aqsa Martyrs hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah. Yamam’s bare legs dangled limply from beneath a white sheet soaked with blood.
Mikdad and two others, one with his head wrapped in bandages, caressed and kissed the boy’s body outside the morgue. The child in his lap was “more precious than the whole world,” Mikdad told an Associated Press photojournalist. He sat against the hospital wall for a while, crying.
Later, a dozen or so men held a funeral prayer over Yamam’s body wrapped in a white shroud. Bystanders, some of them children, watched in silence.