Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Palestine The ending the war in Gaza scheduled to start at 8.30am (06:30 GMT). The al-Qidra family endured 15 months of Israeli aggression. They had been displaced several times and were living in a tent. Their relatives were among the more than 46,900 Palestinians killed by Israel.

But al-Qidras had survived. And they wanted to go home.

Ahmed al-Qidra took his seven children on a donkey cart to the east of Khan Younis. It was finally safe to walk – the bombing had to stop.

But the family did not know that the end of the war between Israel and Hamas was delayed. Little did they know that, even during those extra hours, Israeli planes were still flying over Gaza, ready to drop their bombs.

The explosion was huge. Ahmed Hanan’s wife heard. She stayed at her relative’s house in the center of the city, organizing their belongings, preparing to accompany her husband and children a few hours later.

Hanan said: “The explosion felt like it touched my heart. She instinctively knew that her children were just saying goodbye.

“My children, my children!” he shouted.

The cart had been hit. Hanan’s eldest son, 16-year-old Adly, died. So was his youngest child, six-year-old Sama, the child of the family.

Yasmin, 12 years old, explained that the front of the cart carrying people celebrating the ceasefire was in front of the cart. Maybe that’s why it blew up.

“I saw Sama and Adly lying on the ground, my father bleeding and passed out in the carriage,” said Yasmin. She dragged her eight-year-old sister Aseel outside before the second weapon hit where she sat. Eleven-year-old Mohammed survived.

But Ahmed, who was Hanan’s life partner, was found dead in the hospital.

‘My children were my world’

Sitting by the hospital bed of her injured daughter Iman at Khan Younis’s Nasser hospital, Hanan was horrified.

“Where was the ban?” he asked. In their excitement to finally return to whatever was left of their home, the family disappeared after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the Palestinian group Hamas had not sent the names of three Israeli prisoners who would be freed on Sunday as part of the war. an armistice agreement.

He did not see Hamas explain that there are technical reasons for the delay, and that the names have been given, as they were.

Little did they know that three hours before they stopped fighting, three members of their family would be killed. He was between 19 Palestinians were killed by Israel in the last few hours, according to Gaza Civil Defense.

Hanan burst into tears. Now she would have to face life without her husband and two children. The loss of Sama, “the last of the whole group” as described by an Arab proverb, was very difficult.

“Sama was my youngest and very spoiled. She was angry when I told her that I had another child.”

Adly was his “pillar”. His children were his world.

“We endured the whole war, facing the most difficult conditions of being chased and bombed,” Hanan said. My children were suffering from hunger, lack of food and basic necessities of life.

“We survived for more than a year in this war, but they were killed in its last minutes. How is this possible?”

A happy day had turned into a nightmare. The family had celebrated the end of the war last night.

“Are the Israeli soldiers not satisfied with our blood and the atrocities they committed for 15 months?” Hanan asked.

Then he thought about his future. Her husband and two children crushed her, and in tears, she asked: “What is left?”