Gaza family lost 132 relatives in 1 Israeli strike, NPR finds : NPR
“Forgive me, cousin.
I just sat with you yesterday.
Now I’m writing down your name with the dead.”
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An Israeli strike on a Gaza apartment building killed 132 members of one family in October 2024. It was one of the deadliest Israeli strikes of the Israel-Hamas war. The few survivors documented the dead.
It has been difficult to chronicle the enormous losses to Palestinian families during Israel’s offensive in Gaza, one of the most destructive in recent history.
Working with journalists in Gaza, we reconstructed what happened to one large family in a single moment.
One family. One attack. 132 names.
Investigating one of the deadliest moments of the war in Gaza.
Daniel Estrin, Daniel Wood, Abu Bakr Bashir, Anas Baba, Ahmad Abuhamda, Mahmoud Rehan, Connie Hanzhang Jin
March 24, 2025
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On Oct. 7, 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and taking 251 people hostage, according to Israeli government figures.
In response, Israel launched an offensive against Hamas in Gaza, killing more than 50,000 people in over a year of war, according to Gaza health officials.
The Abu Naser family’s building was hit on Oct. 29, 2024, just months before a ceasefire.
Abu Naser
apartment building
Abu Naser
apartment building
Red areas indicate buildings damaged or destroyed during the war, according to researchers’ estimates.
Red areas indicate buildings damaged or destroyed during the war, according to researchers’ estimates.
The day after the strike, the Israeli military said it had targeted an “enemy spotter” acting as a lookout on the roof and posing a threat to Israeli forces. The military declined to release visual evidence.
We spoke with one of the few survivors.
Waseem Abu Naser, 32, was taken to a hospital in northern Gaza.
Waseem spoke to us on the phone from his hospital bed a couple of weeks after the strike. He described what happened.
The night before the strike, he says he was on the top floor of his family’s five-story building.
Like many in Gaza during the war, he was sheltering with his extended family and neighbors.
The family says more than 200 people were gathered in the building that night.
Shoemakers. Electricians. University students. Grandparents. Young children.
Their neighborhood was under a fierce Israeli offensive that cut off most aid, besieged hospitals and killed thousands in the ensuing months. The Israeli military says it was fighting a Hamas battalion trying to regroup, and dropped leaflets calling on civilians to evacuate. Most fled.
“We packed our bags,” Waseem Abu Naser said.
But there was intense firing, and Israeli drones swarmed the neighborhood. Waseem says it became too dangerous to escape. Then the Israeli military hit the house next door. Debris flew into the family’s building, filling the stairwell with rubble and trapping almost everyone inside.
He and his family gathered in the living room. They put mattresses on the floor and prayed.
The big strike came the next morning, around 4 a.m.
The entire building came crashing down.
Waseem Abu Naser was trapped under the rubble with his 7-year-old son.
“I heard my son saying, ‘Dad, I’m suffocating.’ I told him, ‘Take a breath. They’re coming to get us out.’”
About a half hour later, he heard his cousin Mohammed Nabil’s voice.
“When I looked at the ground, it was all bodies and body parts,” Mohammed Nabil said.
Gaza rescue services couldn’t help. They were blocked by an Israeli military siege on the area.
“They told me: Handle it on your own.”
Mohammed Nabil Abu Naser said he called on neighbors to help pull out the wounded and dead. They prepared burial shrouds.
His cousin Ola Abu Naser, 27, sheltering nearby, came to help.
She wrote down the names of the dead, one by one.
That day, they buried over 100 relatives in mass graves.
Two days later, they and other survivors from the family fled the area, passed through an Israeli checkpoint and took shelter at a cousin’s house in Gaza City.
They kept updating the list: Who was alive? Who was presumed dead under the rubble?
Ola wrote their names and ages in green ink, small letters and neat rows.
Two pages, two columns each.
By her most recent count, 132 relatives and two friends sheltering with them were killed. 134 people in total. More than 40 were wounded.
At the time, the U.S. State Department called it a “horrifying incident.” It asked Israel for an explanation but told NPR it didn’t get one.
We asked the Israeli military detailed questions about the strike, including how it calculated the risk to civilians. The military said the incident is still under review.
We asked a senior Israeli military commander what happened. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.
He said that troops were battling a Hamas battalion in the area and that they believed most civilians had fled.
He said the military did not know the Abu Naser building was full of people. If the military had known, he said, troops would not have struck it.
NPR asked Airwars, a group in London that tracks civilian harm in global conflicts, to review the incident.
Out of more than 1,000 strikes the group has assessed in the Gaza war, it said, the strike on the building housing the Abu Naser family was among the three deadliest.
We took the family’s list of wounded and dead, and mapped the family tree.
Two victims, Israa Abu Naser and Dina Abu Naser, were pregnant.
The family shared photos of loved ones who were killed.
The family’s neighborhood was mostly destroyed, too. Satellite imagery shows how quickly that happened.
We used a drone to get a bird’s-eye view of the area.
During a recent ceasefire, people returned to live among the rubble.
The Abu Naser survivors are now sheltering in a partially damaged house near the ruins of their old building.
They are still there, even as the war has resumed. Israeli troops launched a new ground offensive in their area.
They gathered for a family portrait in front of their destroyed home.
The poster behind them says: “Here are the martyrs of the Abu Naser family massacre.”
The family says some bodies are still trapped under the rubble.
“Every person had a dream,” Ola Abu Naser said about her family.
Ola (center) stands with other survivors from the Abu Naser family
“Everyone talked about what they wanted to do after the war.”
“It was all destroyed in a moment.”