‘He will call me Mama’: The Gaza ‘grandmother’ raising an orphaned baby

Maha is the paternal aunt of Hamza’s father, Omar al-Rubaie. She and her sister, Huriya, raised Omar beginning when he was 15 along with his two brothers after their father was killed in the 2008 Gaza war and their mother remarried.“I raised the father when he was orphaned as a child, and now I am raising the son after he too became an orphan,” Maha explains, looking sorrowfully at the baby.Hamza’s entire immediate family was killed in Israel’s more than two-year genocidal war on Gaza.On March 18, 2024, as Maha prepared food with Hamza’s mother, Diana, to break their Ramadan fast, an Israeli bomb struck their five-storey home in Gaza City.“Black dust, rubble and shrapnel filled the air,” Maha recounts.She, Diana and Omar ran upstairs to where the couple’s three children had been playing with their cousins.“They were buried under the rubble, … no sound, no movement,” she recalls, her voice bitter.Diana and Omar lost their children, eight-year-old Dima, six-year-old Anas and three-year-old Mohammed in the strike along with Omar’s brother, his wife and two children.“Hamza’s mother was completely shattered,” Maha says.After their children were killed, Diana fell into a severe depression while intense grief left Omar unable to eat. Months later, they tried to conceive again. The day Diana’s pregnancy was confirmed, “Omar and Diana cried hysterically, caught between bitter grief for their murdered children and happiness for the baby to come,” Maha recalls.Amid starvation inflicted by Israel, the couple anticipated the arrival of their baby, buying clothes when they could. They spoke of having more children.“They did not know they would be killed and would never see their child at all,” Maha says, her eyes filling with tears.On September 4, 2025, Diana was nine months pregnant when her and Omar’s tent was bombed beside the school where Maha and the rest of their family live. Diana’s mother was killed, and the dying couple was rushed to the hospital. Diana’s sister begged the doctors to save the baby, and an emergency caesarean section was performed in a hospital corridor moments after Diana died.“Imagine that - his date of birth is the same as the date of death of his parents, … his dearest people,” Maha says, her voice breaking. “We received a birth certificate and two death certificates at the same time.”Immediately after his birth, the newborn was transferred to another hospital for neonatal intensive care as he struggled to breathe.Maha saw the baby inside the incubator for the first time as doctors fitted him with a breathing tube.“After five days, his face improved, and we named him Hamza,” Maha says, explaining how Omar had wanted a name that was different from those of his dead children, so they chose Hamza, a name he loved.Maha remembers the first time she held him.“[His] face was beautiful, radiant. … Seeing him lifted some of the sorrow and grief from our hearts amid all the misery surrounding us.”