Investigating One of the Deadliest Moments of the War in Gaza
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You're listening to State of the World from NPR, the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Carrie Cahn. The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has been going on for more than a year and a half.

Today, we're going to revisit one of the most catastrophic moments in that war. NPR spent months investigating an Israeli offensive that leveled a wide swath of northern Gaza. Our reporters and producers interviewed multiple members of an extended family that experienced major losses of life in the attack.

We're going to hear from the team that reported this story a little later. First, NPR's Daniel Estrin is in Tel Aviv. Daniel, tell us what happened and why you decided to dig so deep on this story.

This took place on October 29th, 2024. There were reports that Israel had hit a five-story building that was housing an extended family in North Gaza. This made headlines across the world, and Israel said at the time that it was targeting an enemy spotter on the roof, and there were reports of enormous casualties.

But documenting these kinds of strikes is really challenging. It is not like what happened at the very beginning of the war when Hamas attacked Israel. We have a lot of videos, a lot of evidence of that day. But for the many tens of thousands of strikes that Israel has carried out in Gaza, you don't have the same kind of documentation.

And Israel bars international journalists from entering Gaza independently. Even our colleague Anas Baba, who is in Gaza, could not reach the area where that strike took place because it was under Israeli siege. So how did you look at this? What did you do? So we asked one of the few remaining Palestinian photojournalists who was still in North Gaza, Mahmoud Rehan. We asked him to meet the survivors of that strike. He went to a hospital in Gaza.

He recorded our conversations with them on the phone. He gave his phone over to survivor Wasim Abu Nasser. He was there in his hospital bed with two black eyes. And that is where the story begins.

The day before the strike was a difficult, difficult day, he says. The Israeli military was ordering evacuations, and Waseem says his family was planning to escape. Waseem says, we'd packed our bags and prepared our things, but he says it got too dangerous. He says there was shooting everywhere.

At night, the military struck the house next door. The military now tells us it was a, quote, targeted strike aimed at terrorist infrastructure. Debris flew into the Abu Nasser family building, filling the stairwell with rubble, trapping almost everyone inside. Wasim says there was no way out. He and his family huddled in the living room and prayed.

The strike on the Abu Nasser family building came the next morning, around 4 a.m., October 29th. An Israeli military spokesman said a spotter on the roof had threatened troops without providing evidence.

Waseem was pinned under his fallen ceiling. He says, I can't see, but I can hear. I hear my son saying, Dad, I'm suffocating. I told him, take a breath. They're coming to get us out.

It took more than half an hour for his 32-year-old cousin, Mohamed Abu Nasser, to reach them. Mohamed picks up the story from here. Mohamed says the scene was all bodies and body parts.

Gaza's Civil Defense Rescue Service has told NPR it couldn't reach the besieged area. Mohamed says, they told me, handle it on your own. He cried out to neighbors for help. They climbed into the rubble and removed the wounded and the dead. His cousin, 27-year-old Ola Abu Nasser, sheltering across the street, took pen and paper and became the official documenter of her family's loss.

Body after body. I kept identifying one by one. For example, oh, this is my cousin Soher. Forgive me, cousin. I just sat with you yesterday. And now I'm writing down your name with the dead, she says.

That morning, they buried more than 100 relatives in two mass graves. Ola and her cousin Mohamed evacuated to safety but never stopped revising the list. Who'd been left under the rubble? Who eventually died of their wounds? They didn't want to forget anyone. Ola wrote out the names and ages in green ink, small letters, neat rows, filling two pages.

The death toll she eventually tallied was 132 relatives and two others sheltering in their building. It was a much higher count than reported previously. At the time, media reports put the death toll around 90. It's become common in Gaza for families to need to count their own dead, says Raji Surani of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. If they didn't do that, who will do it?

You want to know who died, who's still alive, at least. I mean, people just bring bin and pad, writing with blood and pain. The family's list nearly matches a count by air wars. NPR asked the London-based war monitoring group to look into the incident. Out of more than 1,000 strikes the group has assessed throughout the Gaza war, it says the Abu Nasser family strike is among the top three deadliest.

NPR asked the Israeli military detailed questions about the strike, including how it calculated the risk to civilians. The military said the, quote, details are under review. A senior military commander not authorized to brief us publicly and speaking on condition of anonymity told us the army would not have hit the building if it had known it was full of people. Most people had already fled the area.

Gaza's civil defense says thousands were killed in that offensive. For Ola Abu Nasser and her cousins, those dead are not just numbers. She continues to work on the list where she's sheltering. An Israeli drone buzzes above. She writes out her dead relatives' occupations. They were shoemakers, electricians, university students. She writes out the number of people who were injured.

NPR mapped out the extended Abu Nasser family tree. Nine nuclear families were wiped out. Others were only left with two or three survivors. Close to half of the dead were children. The youngest killed was six weeks old, the eldest 75. At one point, we arrived as a group of people sitting on our hands.

In one moment, we became just a few people you could count on your fingers, she says. Everyone had plans for after the war. It was all destroyed in a moment. Satellite imagery of the Abu Nasser family's neighborhood shows most of the homes erased, just faint outlines of where they used to be, like shadows.

That's NPR's Daniel Estrin reporting on one of the deadliest moments of the Gaza war. A team at NPR has put together an astonishing visual investigation online. It's in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, where you can follow the story step by step and see photos of the victims and a family tree that NPR built showing the extent of the losses. We're going to take a look at the story.

We're going to hear from some of that reporting team now. Daniel and I are joined by two of NPR's producers, Abu Bakr Bashir and Anas Baba. Welcome to you both. Thank you. Thank you. Let's go now to you, Abu Bakr, in London. You are from Gaza, and you were instrumental in contacting the family and staying in touch with them throughout the month-long investigation. Tell us, how did you do that from London?

Well, it's never been easy. The entire reporting during the war was not easy, but this was one of the most challenging and difficult stories to report on because of the scale of the casualties. And we know at the end of the day, it's one of the three deadliest attacks on Gaza. But...

I had to talk to the survivors, mainly Ola. Ola is the cousin, correct? Ah, yes. This contact went on for months, actually, and this took it to the completely different level from reporting on other stories where you need to speak to the interviewees once or twice, max, sometimes three times. But it never been like months of contacting the same person, reporting on the worst story ever.

for them and having to be the person reminding someone in Gaza every single time you call with the agony and the suffering and the loss. I felt bad. I had to sort of push to get more data because it's good for the victims and Ola to be speaking.

Personally, it was too much for me to bear on the psychological level. I remember there were like more than once after I finished the interview with her, I called my family, who luckily are in Egypt now, my mother and brothers, because I felt they were sick.

Like really lucky that they managed to flee themselves after what I reported about on Ola's story. It was too much for me to bear. But again, it's nothing compared to what Ola had to go through herself with her family.

The worst day that struck her family. It's powerful. Anas, you are actually in Gaza, and you are the only one on the team that actually met the family. There was a recent ceasefire that allowed you to finally go to this area and meet the Abu Nasr family, what's left of it, and finally document firsthand what was left of their neighborhood. Tell us about what that was like.

I was truly shocked, surprised. Abu Nasr family there, yes, but the city itself, it was not. It took me a while to understand what exactly this area from this neighborhood, everything was flat into the ground. At that moment, when I reached Beit Lahya, me and our journalist, Mahmoud Riham, we went there and we met the family for the first time.

We asked them that we want them to reunite for a family picture in front of the debris, the rubble of their own house. I still remember that look on their faces, especially for the father. I do believe he's Ola's father. And he told me, you want us to go to the site. Maybe you don't know that, but we didn't visit the site of the house yet.

maybe few of us who could manage to do that, who do have the courage to go back to where we survived. Aula started to cry. Children also cried. I remember the father that he lost all of his family, his wife and his children. And he was the only survivor and he was badly injured. He just sat on his side and he started to cry. He remembered them.

Honest, seeing those pictures of the family reunited on the pile of rubble was just astonishing. After only ever hearing from the family. Daniel, you spent months documenting with the team this tragic incident. What did you take away from it? I think for me it hit home when I saw the family tree that our team built.

And you know, it's so hard to comprehend that number. 132 relatives from one extended family killed in a moment. But when you look at that family tree, you can really picture it. You see four generations nearly wiped out. And that's just one family. Imagine so many other families who have lost so many loved ones. This is just one of many, many stories of what's happened in Gaza.

Thank you all. That's Anas Baba in Gaza City, Abu Bakr Bashir in London, and Daniel Estrin in Tel Aviv. Thank you so much, Carrie. Thank you. Thank you, Carrie. You can see the visual investigation of this tragic incident at NPR.org, and you'll find a link to that in our episode notes. That's State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.

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