Central Jersey family mourning loss of 9 relatives in Gaza: "Four generations gone in one shot"
FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP, N.J. -- A New Jersey father is mourning the loss of his nine relatives in Gaza.
On Halloween night, the Shaban family's doorbell was rung not by trick-or-treaters, but by mourners, giving their condolences.
"I look at the picture of my brother burned and I tell my son, I could feel his pain. Honestly, I could feel his pain," said Atef Shaban.
The Central Jersey family just found out that over the weekend, nine of their Palestinian relatives in Gaza were killed in a blast. The oldest was 72, and the youngest just 3 months old.
"So four generations gone in one shot," Atef's son Sami Shaban said.
Atef Shaban's brother was spared but badly burned.
"In the hospital, there's no room for him, so they have him just in the hallway on these sort of cardboard boxes. There's no anesthesia, no nothing, so when they need to operate on you, they just go directly into you with no pain relief at all, and so he's not actually fully aware even of what's happened yet. He keeps asking for his wife," Sami Shaban said.
The family says their relatives in Gaza are now starting to excavate the bodies from the rubble. But the victims, they say, were so decimated that it's a struggle to find enough of their remains to have something to bury.
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"I think it's important for people to understand what's happening to the Palestinians," Sami Shaban said.
Sami Shaban, who is on the Board of Education in Franklin Township, says he's sharing his family's story to put faces to the civilians lost in the war.
"October 7th was horrific, a horrific day, and our hearts bleed for all innocent citizens. But the amount of pain that's happened since that day, we've now had over 6,000 lives lost ... We need to call for a cease-fire. We really need this pain to stop," he said.
In the meantime, the Shaban family prays for all of their relatives still living there.
