Aref Aboukwaik, a 62-year-old bagel shop owner who lives in Wayne, pointed to a photograph of his niece’s smiling baby daughter, Maria, tacked to a whiteboard with pictures of two dozen other family members that were on display in a downtown Newark office on Wednesday.
Aboukwaik said Maria was killed in Gaza five months after the picture was taken, on June 28, when she was just 10 months old. Maria’s 29-year-old mother, Isra, Aboukwaik’s niece, was killed at the same time, when he said an Israeli drone entered the bedroom window of their three-family house in northern Gaza and exploded.
“I was on the phone with them an hour before they got killed,” said Abroukwaik, who came to New Jersey 44 years ago from Gaza to study engineering, became a U.S. citizen, and has lived in the Garden State ever since…