RENNES, France: When Israeli airstrikes hit his neighborhood at the start of the Gaza war, the life of 42-year-old Palestinian social worker Tareq Abu Eita was turned upside down within seconds.
During the bombing on October 14, the walls of his two-story family home were torn down.
His 77-year-old father Hamed, his wife Muntaha (37), with whom he had been married for 15 years, and his 11-year-old son Ilyas were killed.
It also claimed the lives of his two nieces, eight-year-old Mira and 14-year-old Tala.
“It's all gone,” Abu Eita said in the French city of Rennes, a tear running down his cheek, after showing AFP pictures of his wedding and his deceased son grinning at his phone.
He and another son, 14-year-old Fares, are among the few Palestinians wounded in the war who were flown to France for special medical treatment.
The latest Gaza war began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. According to Israeli statistics compiled by AFP, 1,197 people were killed, most of them civilians.
According to health authorities, at least 39,550 people have died in Israel's retaliatory offensive in the area. No information has been given on the number of civilian and insurgent deaths.
“It’s not just numbers,” said Abu Eita.
“Each of these people had their loved ones, their family, their memories.”
He and his son Fares were outside their home in the refugee camp in northern Jabalia after receiving a water delivery at the time of the attacks and were both seriously injured.
Fares suffered a large skull fracture that left him in a coma for more than three weeks.
Nine months later, as Israeli forces continue to shell the devastated Gaza Strip, both are recovering after extensive medical treatment in France.
But Abu Eita is terribly afraid that he might now lose two more sons, whom he had to leave behind without a mother in the besieged area: ten-year-old Jud and 15-year-old Ahmad.
“It would be a disaster if something happened to them,” said the father.
“I really couldn’t handle it.”
Abu Eita says he was promised that once he was granted asylum, he would be able to apply to bring his children to France.
But he is still waiting, and he has too much time to think about the impossible decision he has made.
“Fares was dying. If I had stayed, I would have lost him,” he said.
According to Gaza authorities, more than 91,000 people have been injured in the Israeli offensive since October 7.
According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, about ten children in the Gaza Strip lose one or both legs every day.
Aspiring football player Asef Abu Mhadi, 12, is one of them.
He says he was playing soccer in front of his house in the central Nuseirat refugee camp on October 16 when his neighborhood was hit and reduced to rubble.
“I thought there was debris on my leg,” he said, sitting in a wheelchair near a hospital in a Paris suburb, a Palestinian football scarf slung over his shoulder.
“I sat up to remove it and found that my leg was severed.”
Asef was also flown to France for treatment with his mother Raja Abdulkarim Abu Mhadi.
But Abu Mhadi, a 47-year-old who lost her husband when Asef was a toddler, was not allowed to bring her other five children – Enas, 13, Aisha, 15, Ahmad, 17, Moayed, 18, and Mohammed, 20.
The mother, who says she lost three nephews in the war, is also full of worries while waiting.
