A 25-day-old baby has been rescued from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building in Gaza.
After hearing cries of a baby from underneath concrete rubble in Khan Younis, rescuers dug down to find the infant alive.
Rescuers wrapped the child in a blanket and rushed her to a nearby ambulance crew where she stirred fitfully as paramedics checked her over.
Calls of "God is great" rang out from the rescuers and onlookers.
The girl was identified as Ella Osama Abu Dagga, who was born 25 days earlier, in the midst of the ceasefire.
Her parents and brother died in the overnight Israeli air strike on Khan Younis.
Only the girl's grandparents survived the attack. Her brother, mother and father were killed, along with another family that included a father and his seven children.
"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."
Rescuers digging through the rubble could be seen pulling out the small body of another child sprawled on the mattress where he had been sleeping.
Family knew war would return
The girl's grandmother, Fatima Abu Dagga, 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."
She took turns holding her grandchild with other women in a relative's house in the area.
Her sons and their wives and eight grandchildren died in the most recent strikes with only the baby surviving.
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.
Air strikes in Khan Younis continue
Israel resumed heavy strikes across Gaza on Tuesday, shattering the ceasefire with Hamas.
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 United States, Qatar and Egypt.
Nearly 600 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including more than 400 on Tuesday alone, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
The strike that destroyed the infant 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.
It was inside an area the Israeli military ordered evacuated earlier this week, encompassing most of eastern Gaza.
The Israel military says it only targets militants and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because it is deeply 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 took hold in January.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage.
Israel's retaliatory air and ground offensive has killed nearly 49,000 Palestinians since then, more than half of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
AP
