Mohammed Abu Al-Qumsan had just picked up birth certificates for his newly-born twins when he found out they had been killed, along with his wife and her mother, by an Israeli strike on the Gaza apartment where they were sheltering, Reuters reports.

He waved the laminated documents, supposed to signify rare joy in the besieged Palestinian enclave, as a man held him while he wept at the morgue where their bodies were brought.

“My wife is gone, my two babies and my mother-in-law. I was told it’s a tank shell on the apartment they were in, in a house we were displaced to,” said Abu Al-Qumsan, 31, recalling the devastating phone call from people in the neighbourhood.

He and others carried his boy and girl, Asser and Ayssel, who were wrapped in white shrouds.

A man prayed as the bodies were placed in the back of a car and a crowd gathered and people looked on from the balcony of one of Gaza’s overwhelmed emergency rooms, at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the centre of the coastal strip.

“Today, it was registered in history that the occupation army targets newborn children who are barely four days old, twins along with their mother and grandmother,” hospital doctor Khalil al-Daqran said.