Palestinian newborn twins killed as father gets birth certificates

Mohammed Abu Al Qumsan had just picked up birth certificates for his newly-born twins when he found out they had been killed, along with his wife and her mother, by an Israeli strike on the Gaza apartment where they were sheltering.

He waved the laminated documents, supposed to signify rare joy in the besieged Palestinian enclave, as a man held him while he wept at the morgue where their bodies were brought.

"My wife is gone, my two babies and my mother-in-law. I was told it's a tank shell on the apartment they were in, in a house we were displaced to," said Abu Al Qumsan, 31, recalling the devastating phone call from people in the neighbourhood.

He and others carried his boy and girl, Asser and Ayssel, who were wrapped in white shrouds, a common sight in Gaza, where Israel's land and air campaign has put hundreds of thousands of people regularly on the move in search of shelter.

A man prayed as the bodies were placed in the back of a car and a crowd gathered and people looked on from the balcony of one of Gaza's overwhelmed emergency rooms, at the Al Aqsa Maryrs Hospital in Deir Al Balah in the centre of the coastal strip.

Israel struck back with an offensive that has killed nearly 40,000 people and wounded more than 92,000, according to Israeli tallies, and reduced much of Gaza to rubble.