Fearful of Israeli air strikes on buildings, Rami Awad spent days looking for tents so that he could move his family to the relative safety of an outdoor camp in Rafah, southern Gaza, but he could not find any, according to his brother Mohammed Awad.

In the early hours of Saturday, Rami, his wife and two of their sons were killed, along with other relatives, when a strike hit the apartment where they were staying in the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.

A third son, 11-year-old Mahmoud Awad, survived because he spent the night in another apartment. By morning, he was at the morgue of the European Hospital, where his parents and brothers lay on metal shelves, wrapped in shrouds.

“My mother told me ‘go and sleep at your uncle Issa’s house tonight’. So I went to my uncle Issa’s house, and they bombed the house [where his family were staying],” said Mahmoud, surrounded by other children who listened in silence.

“They were all martyred, my brothers and my father, Rami Awad, and my youngest brother, who was in second grade, and my eldest brother Muath, who was in eighth grade,” he said, speaking calmly but taking rapid breaths as if trying to stifle sobs.

Read the full story by Reuters here.