Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from a series of devastating Israeli attacks that have highlighted the high number of civilian casualties and widespread destruction resulting from what Israel calls targeted strikes against Hamas.
Several United Nations officials have reported harrowing scenes in the densely populated strip following large-scale Israeli strikes in recent days, including child amputees unable to receive medical treatment after being bombed in supposed safe zones. The UN chief called the devastation “incomprehensible and inexcusable” and reiterated calls for an end to the fighting.
“We never lived in fear like this. There was blood everywhere,” Gaza resident Ruwaida Issa told a CNN stringer at a school sheltering displaced people that was hit by a double Israeli missile strike on Sunday. “We were running looking for our children; remains of people were scattered all over the yard… We came here to shelter for nothing. There is no safety here. We want this war to stop; we can’t bear this anymore.”
Since Friday, Israel has launched waves of deadly missile strikes and attacks on what it labeled “terrorist” targets in central and southern Gaza, as its military hunts down Hamas leadership with US-made munitions.
On Sunday, the Israeli military claimed to have targeted Hamas’ military chief and killed a Hamas brigade commander in an airstrike in Khan Younis. Israeli intelligence services said dozens of Hamas operatives involved in the October 7 attacks on Israel had been killed in the past week following “intensified activity” in Gaza.
However, the human toll from Israel’s weekend bombardment has been severe.
The strike targeting Hamas’ military chief hit a displacement camp in Al-Mawasi, designated by the Israeli military as a safe zone for Palestinians fleeing the fighting elsewhere, killing at least 90 people and injuring 300, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. CNN has not been able to verify the casualty numbers reported by the ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants killed.
Overwhelmed hospitals struggled to cope with the dead and wounded. A senior staffer at UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, described the Nasser hospital, which took in casualties of the strike, as “the most horrific scenes I have seen in my nine months in Gaza.”
“I saw toddlers who are double amputees, children paralyzed and unable to receive treatment, and others separated from their parents,” said Scott Anderson, director of UNRWA Affairs in Gaza, in a statement. “Parents told me in despair that they had moved into the ‘so-called humanitarian zone’ in the hope that their children would be safe there.”
The following day, at least 22 people were killed in a double Israeli missile strike on the Abu Oreiban school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, central Gaza, where hundreds had taken refuge.
The Israeli military said its air force struck the location where “a number of terrorists” were operating. But Nuseirat residents told CNN it was mainly women, children, and the elderly who were sheltering at the school, which had been turned into a shelter run by UNRWA.
“We are pulling a hand here and a leg there from under the rubble. Civilians who did nothing wrong,” one man interviewed by a CNN stringer at the scene said.
Casualty figures from sources in Gaza are difficult to independently verify, but the Gaza Ministry of Health reported 319 Palestinians were killed and 802 injured in the strip between Thursday and Monday.
cnn