Maha is the paternal aunt of Hamza’s father, Omar al-Rubaie. She and her sister, Huriya, raised Omar beginning when he was 15 along with his two brothers after their father was killed in the 2008 Gaza war and their mother remarried.“I raised the father when he was orphaned as a child, and now I am raising the son after he too became an orphan,” Maha explains, looking sorrowfully at the baby.Hamza’s entire immediate family was killed in Israel’s more than two-year genocidal war on Gaza.On March 18, 2024, as Maha prepared food with Hamza’s mother, Diana, to break their Ramadan fast, an Israeli bomb struck their five-storey home in Gaza City.“Black dust, rubble and shrapnel filled the air,” Maha recounts.She, Diana and Omar ran upstairs to where the couple’s three children had been playing with their cousins.“They were buried under the rubble, … no sound, no movement,” she recalls, her voice bitter.Diana and Omar lost their children, eight-year-old Dima, six-year-old Anas and three-year-old Mohammed in the strike along with Omar’s brother, his wife and two children.“Hamza’s mother was completely shattered,” Maha says.After their children were killed, Diana fell into a severe depression while intense grief left Omar unable to eat. Months later, they tried to conceive again. The day Diana’s pregna …
