Deir el-Balah, Gaza – On Saturday morning, Waad Abu Zaher was standing on a crowded street in al-Mawasi in the southern Gaza Strip trying to find a donkey cart, minibus or some other transport so she could go to work.
The 30-year-old journalist works out of a media tent at the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis and commutes east from a tent camp in al-Mawasi. She lives there with her parents and four brothers, who have been displaced eight times since Israel first issued an evacuation order soon after the war on Gaza began on October 7.
That morning she watched as her father left for work and her brothers went off to collect water and buy groceries. It was around 10am as she stood in a lively part of the camp for displaced people, with vendors, water filling points and a community kitchen distributing food to children who had lined up to collect free meals.
“Suddenly, the first missile hit, then the second. I found myself flying and landing a short distance away. The sky turned white with dust. The third missile. I started running and screaming, ‘My brothers, my brothers!’” she recounted, choking up as she spoke over WhatsApp.
“Israel not only forced us to live in tents unsuitable for human life, but also pursued us here with bombs and missiles,” she said.
‘I checked my body as I ran’
Waad says she started running, searching for her brothers. “I checked my body as I ran — ‘Are my eyes in place? Is my head OK? My legs, my hands, my face?’” she recalled thinking.
“I was running around, surrounded by corpses, blood, [scattered] pots of [the] children who had lined up at the food kitchen, and gallons of water,” she said.
“I saw people carrying a young man with a shattered leg, and another young man running behind them with an amputated leg, screaming, ‘I found his leg,’” she said quietly, at some points crying as she recalled the attack.
“I saw a pregnant woman lying on the ground, bleeding from between her legs, next to an injured child whose arm was gone.”
Around her, people had started running towards the area that had been struck to help. She recalls the mothers arriving, screaming and searching for their children. “Every mother knows her child will be here because it’s where we fill water, receive food, or charge internet cards,” she said. “This area is the heart of life in Mawasi Khan Younis.”
Amidst the chaos, Waad found her brothers, and ran to them, hugging them. They were covered in dust but unharmed.
Israel’s attack on Saturday — in an area designated a “safe zone” by the Israeli military and where thousands of displaced Palestinians are sheltering — killed at least 90 people and wounded 300 others, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Israeli warplanes struck tents and a water distillation area.
Waad says she may have survived the attack, but she is in shock. “Every time I think about what happened, I burst into tears.”
Waad says she still cannot believe that their homes were attacked and says that many in the camp are thinking about moving elsewhere. “[But] here the question remains: ‘Where can we go?’” she asked.
‘Surviving here is a matter of luck’
Badee’ Daaour, 36, lives with his wife and four children in al-Mawasi. “We had just finished breakfast and were preparing for the day,” he recalled of the morning of the July 13 attack.
Suddenly, huge explosions hit the area. “I didn’t comprehend what was going on. My wife and I were screaming and shouting for our children. We couldn’t see anything through the dust.”
“The plumes of fire were only 50 metres (165 feet) away,” he recalled. “My tent was destroyed, and several nearby tents were set on fire.”
Badee’ remembers dragging his youngest child from the tent and running with his wife past other tents, seeking safety. “Everyone was screaming. The sounds of bombing were horrific.”
As they arrived near an area that had been hit, Badee’ was shocked by what he saw. “Blood was everywhere, shreds of dead bodies were on the ground, kids covered in blood,” he recalled in a quiet voice.
“I saw people who were buried alive under the sand due to the intensity of the bombing. People gathered to pull them out. Some were alive, some were killed or injured.”
He frantically searched for his three other children who had been outside when the attacks happened.
“I saw many mothers and fathers running and screaming desperately for their lost children. Many of them found their kids shattered into pieces in the attack. They were about to lose their minds,” he added.
He was relieved to find his remaining children were safe and then, when he was a bit calmer, Badee’ noticed his leg had been slightly injured and so he headed to the hospital for treatment.
Badee’ arrived at Nasser Medical Complex, Gaza’s second-largest hospital, which has barely returned to service after ground and air assaults by the Israeli military rendered it nonoperational.
“My neighbour in the next tent was injured in the back, then he found his little daughter was killed and the other one was severally injured in her spine,” he said.
Badee’ has been trying to comfort and help his neighbour.
“He was sitting inside his tent, two metres away from me, but the shrapnel pierced into his tent, not mine,” he explained while sitting in his family’s tent that was brought down in the attacks and has now been put up again.
“Surviving here is a matter of luck. Every one of us waits for his turn in this ongoing genocide,” Badee’ said.
“Bombing tents in which thousands of displaced people were crowded with several heavy missiles? How does Israel justify this action?”
Badee’ had come to Khan Younis from Gaza City in the north following Israeli evacuation orders, moving multiple times before ending up in al-Mawasi.
“Israel claimed this area was safe, but it has been targeted repeatedly,” he said. “Safe zones in Gaza are a mere lie. No place is safe here.”
The July 13 al-Mawasi attacks in which Israel said it was targeting Hamas leader Mohammed Deif were condemned by the United Nations and leaders across the Middle East.
Attack on Nusairat school
One day after the al-Mawasi attacks, Israeli forces struck the United Nations-run Abu Oreiban school in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The attack killed at least 17 people and injured about 80. Most of the victims were women and children, said the Palestinian Civil Defence.
It was the fifth school that Israel had struck in eight days.
“It was noon,” recounted Um Mohammad al-Hasanat, 54, who lives with her family of eight in two classrooms with other families.
“We were sitting normally in a nearby classroom. There were women cooking and I decided to relax a little. Suddenly two missiles hit. We saw stones falling on top of us and scattering everywhere.”
Al-Hasanat described fragments of missiles smashing the classroom she was in, trapping several people who were screaming under the rubble.
“The scene was terrifying. Children were dismembered. There was blood everywhere. Rubble fell directly on the tents of the displaced in the middle of the hospital,” al-Hasanat recalled, looking frightened as she sat in the courtyard in front of the part of the school that was hit.
Al-Hasanat sustained minor injuries to her head and hand, but her cousin was killed and her cousin’s son and husband were seriously injured.
“We are very tired. I was displaced from north to south, and in the south, we were bombarded and displaced dozens of times,” she said.
“Every day there is a massacre, every day there is a targeting of schools and tents, and the victims are displaced people, children and women?
“Where can we go? When will the world take action?”
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