Month-old girl pulled from rubble in Gaza after air strike kills her parents

A baby girl has been rescued from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Gaza after 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.

“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 a war that has devastated the enclave, killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly its entire population.

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.

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.”

Israel resumed heavy strikes across Gaza on Tuesday, shattering the truce that had facilitated the release of more than two dozen hostages.

Israel blamed the renewed fighting on Hamas because the militant group rejected a new proposal for the second phase of the ceasefire that departed from their signed agreement, which was mediated by the US, Qatar and Egypt.

Nearly 600 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including more than 400 on Tuesday, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Health officials said most of the victims were women and children.

The strike that destroyed the baby girl’s home hit Abasan al-Kabira, a village just outside of Khan Younis near the border with Israel, killing at least 16 people, mostly women and children, according to the nearby European Hospital which received the dead.

Nabil Abu Dagga, a relative of Ella’s family who lives nearby, rushed to the scene of the strike.

“People were sitting together and enjoying themselves on a Ramadan night, staying up together as a family,” he said. “No one was expecting it and no one would imagine that a human could kill another human in this way.”

He and others started pulling out bodies. Then they heard the baby girl’s cries.

The Israel military says it only targets militants and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because it is embedded in residential areas.

Hours later, the Israeli military restored a blockade on northern Gaza, including Gaza City, that it had maintained for most of the war but which had been lifted under the ceasefire deal.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had returned to what remains of their homes in the north after a ceasefire began in January.

The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on October 7 2023, killing 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage.

Israel’s retaliatory air and ground offensive has since killed nearly 49,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. It does not say how many were militants.

Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence.