Their mobile phones began to ring with a desperate insistence a day after the attack, as the first calls came from Syria to Jordan to Israel, where a branch of the scattered Waked family resides.
Walid Gazi Waked wrote down names, and then more names. When the Nazareth resident was done, the extended clan had lost 21 members to a suspected chemical weapons attack Wednesday in a run-down and religiously conservative town called Zamalka, just east of Damascus, on the front lines of Syria's civil war.
The tally for the Wakeds was 12 women and girls and nine men and boys killed, according to the family. Fifteen others were sickened by gas. Five are in critical condition in Syrian hospitals, the family said. Among the dead, the oldest was 68, and the youngest was 10 or 11.