By IRNA,
Gaza City : Four Gazan children and their mother died in Israeli air strikes on Gaza on Monday.
Israel said that they were killed in clash with Israeli soldiers.
Miyasar Abu Meatak was preparing breakfast for her children in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun when the shell struck, her stepson Ibrahim said.
Her children, aged 15 months to 6 years, were killed instantly, and she died shortly afterward in a local hospital, Palestinian officials said, and her two older children were critically wounded.
“What a black day. They killed my family,” wailed the grief-stricken father, Ahmad Abu Meatak, outside the hospital where the bodies were taken.
Abu Meatak said he was on his way to a nearby market to shop when the tank shell hit.
At the hospital morgue, distraught family members and medics stood over the bodies, crying and flailing their hands in the air.
The force of the blast scattered clothes and other household items outside the two-room home.
A single white children’s shoe, flattened by the explosion, lay on the ground near a blue pair of shorts covered in sand. A green baby seat, one end bent, stood empty.
A large crowd of people milled about as rescue crews cleaned up the debris and bloodstains in the sand.
Omar Abdel Nabi said he was driving his tractor in a nearby field when two or three explosions shook the ground.
“People were screaming that a tank shell landed in the next street,” he said.
“I carried two people covered in blood out of a house.”