Last goodbye The doctor who lost nine children in Gaza strike

In the early hours of Friday, as she did every day, Dr Alaa al-Najjar said goodbye to her 10 children before leaving the house.

- Malak A Tantesh Gaza Lorenzo Tondo Jerusalem

In the early hours of Friday, as she did every day, Dr Alaa al-Najjar said goodbye to her 10 children before leaving the house. The youngest, Sayden, six months old, was still sleeping. And like every day, with war raging in Gaza and Israeli strikes landing just metres from her neighbourhood in Khan Younis, Alaa worried about leaving them at home without her.

But Alaa, 35, had little choice. One of Gaza's dwindling number of medics, a respected paediatrician at the Nasser medical complex, she had to go to work to care for injured babies who had barely survived Israeli attacks. She could never have imagined that farewell to her family would be her last.

A few hours later, the charred bodies of seven of her children, killed by an Israeli airstrike, arrived at her own hospital. Two other bodies, including Sayden's, remained under the rubble.

Of her 10 children, only one had survived, along with their father, Hamdi al-Najjar, 40, also a doctor.

Both are in hospital.

"It's one of most heartbreaking tragedies since the beginning of the conflict," Mohammed Saqer, the head of nursing at Nasser hospital, told the Guardian. "And it happened to a paediatrician who dedicated her life to saving children, only to have her own motherhood stolen in a moment of fire and deafening silence."

Footage shared by the director of the Hamas-run health ministry and verified by the Guardian shows the burned, dismembered bodies of children being pulled from the rubble of the family's building near a petrol station in Khan Younis, as flames still engulfed what remained of their home.

The Israeli missile, described as having a "precision" targeting system, did not just destroy the building, it reduced it to a mountain of rubble.