RENNES, France: When Israeli airstrikes hit his neighborhood at the start of the Gaza war, Palestinian social worker Tarek Abu Eita, 42, saw his whole life turned upside down in seconds.
The bombing on October 14 destroyed the walls of his two-story house.
He killed his 77-year-old father Hamed, his 15-year-old wife Muntaha, 37, and his 11-year-old son Ilyas.
It took the lives of his two nieces, eight-year-old Mira and 14-year-old Tali.
“Everything is gone,” Abu Eita said with tears streaming down his cheek in the French city of Rennes after showing AFP photos of his wedding and the deceased smiling on his phone.
He and another son, Fares, 14, are among a handful of Palestinians wounded during the war who have been flown to France for specialized treatment.
The latest war in Gaza began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to AFP Israeli figures.
Israel's retaliatory offensive killed at least 39,550 people, according to health authorities in the territory, which did not provide details on civilian or militant casualties.
“It's not just numbers,” Abu Eita said.
“Each of these people had their loved ones, their family, their memories.”
He and his son Fares were outside their home in the northern Jabaliya refugee camp after getting water when they were struck and both were seriously injured.
Phares suffered a large skull fracture that left him in a coma for more than three weeks.
Nine months later, with Israeli troops still pounding the devastated Gaza Strip, both are recovering in France after extensive medical care.
But Abu Eita fears that now he may lose two more sons, whom he was forced to leave without a mother in the besieged territory: 10-year-old Judah and 15-year-old Ahmad.
“There will be trouble if anything happens to them,” said the father.
“I really couldn't handle it.”
Abu Eita says he was promised that once he was granted asylum, he would be able to apply for his children to come to France.
But he still expects that leaves him too much time to agonize over the impossible choice he made.
“Fares was dying. If I had stayed, I would have lost him,” he said.
Gaza authorities say more than 91,000 people have been injured in Israel's offensive since October 7.
Among them, about 10 children in Gaza lose one or both legs every day, according to the UN agency for Palestine refugees.
One of them is a budding soccer player, 12-year-old Assef Abu Mhadi.
He says he was playing soccer outside his home in the central Nuseirat refugee camp on October 16 when his neighborhood was hit, reducing it to rubble.
“I thought there was garbage on my leg,” he said, sitting in a wheelchair with a Palestinian soccer scarf over his shoulder outside a hospital in a Paris suburb.
“I sat down to remove it and I found that my leg had been cut off.”
Assef was also flown to France for treatment with his mother Raja Abdulkarim Abu Mhadi.
But Abu Mhadi, a 47-year-old woman who lost her husband when Assef was a baby, was not allowed to take her other five children, Enas, 13, Aisha, 15, Ahmad, 17, Maaed, 18, and 20 Mohammed. .
The mother, who says she lost three nephews in the war, is also anxious in anticipation.
