Quintuplets occur in approximately one in 55 million births. After eight years of longing for a baby, Heba Eid gave birth to three sons and two daughters. With her husband, Haytham Eid, a master calligrapher and designer, she brought them up in the Palestinian town of Deir al Balah. At 15 years of age, they were happy, loving teenagers, all of them doing well at school.
Ten days after the conflict with Israel began, the Eid's house was bombed and reduced to rubble. Along with 10 relatives, their mother and their father, all the quintuplets died. The Eids became one of the thousands of Palestinian families with no survivors that had to be deleted from the civil registry.
Neighbours dug into the rubble with shovels in their hands and gathered together pieces of the 15 bodies. The dead quintuplets were so fragmented by the force of the Israeli strike that they were buried together, all in the one shroud: -- Khaled, Ismail, Mahmoud, Areej and Maryam,