On October 12th 2023 at least four members of the Abu Hilal family were killed, including eight month pregnant Amani Muhammad Hassan Abu Hilal, and her their three young sons – in an alleged Israeli airstrike in El Geneina, Rafah, in the Gaza strip. The children’s father, Jamal Ali Abu Hilal, was also reported as injured.
Facebook user @mohamedAnaya9 shared a video which allegedly depicts the Abu Hilal family house in the El Geneina neighborhood, which is destroyed along with neighboring houses to rubble.
Friends and family identified the following victims on social media as Amani Muhammad Hassan Abu Hilal, the mother and wife, her eight month fetus and her three sons Ahmad Jamal Ali Abu Hilal, Ali Jamal Ali Abu Hilal and Muhammad Jamal Ali Abu Hilal.
The father, Jamal Abu Hilal, who is identified by relatives and friends on social media as an engineer, was taken into intensive care after being critically injured in the attack.
The victims’ deaths were mourned by friends and family on Social media. Noureddine Abu Hilal described the three children as ‘birds of paradise’, attaching a photo which depicts the young boys standing alongside one another in jeans and shirts, smiling gently toward the camera.
One of the young sons, Muhammad Jamal Ali Abu Hilal, is described in a Facebook post by his teacher, Learn English with Alaa, as a ‘distinguished student’. His teacher posted a heartfelt testimony about the death of his student, writing that Muhammad “ left with his brothers and their mother. Where is the humanity!!!! Where are you, world!!! What is the fault of these innocent children!!!!”. A shared video depicts the boy in the midst of a language class in front of a chalkboard speaking confidently in English.
On Facebook, Umm Mohammad Abu Hilal, referred to “two massacres” which hit her family the same day, the first one killing two brothers, and the second one leading to the death of Amani Muhammad Hassan Abu Hilal and her children. The first incident has been coded separately as ISPT0145. Several local sources claimed that 12 members of Abu Hilal family were killed – though Airwars could only identify eight victims by name in the two separate attacks. @esraasaid2 on Twitter affirmed that among those 12 victims, three infants “born 10 days ago” were killed, without specifying in which incident they were killed or providing their names. Airwars’ maximum death toll estimates for this incident and for ISPT0145 was set at 12, as no further information was available regarding these four additional victims. As such, it is possible that the maximum number of victims may contain casualties from both incidents. Airwars will update its estimates when more information comes to light.
Where sources identified the belligerent, all sources attributed the strikes to Israeli forces.
Airwars has matched the names of the mother and her three children killed with the Palestinian Ministry of Health list of nearly 7000 victims’ names and ID numbers released on October 26th.