ByHiba Yazbek and Abu Bakr Bashir
Updated May 28, 2024 —
Jerusalem: Witnesses and survivors described a terrifying scene of tents in flames and burn victims after what the Gaza Health Ministry said was an Israeli strike on a tent camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
The ministry said at least 45 people in the camp had been killed and 240 others wounded.
Palestinians look at the destruction after an Israeli strike where displaced people were staying in Rafah.CREDIT:AP
The Israeli military said that it had aimed a strike at a Hamas compound and killed two Hamas leaders. A legal official with the military said the strike was under review.
Bilal al-Sapti, 30, a construction worker in Rafah, said he saw charred bodies in the wreckage of the camp in the Tal al-Sultan area of Rafah, and people screaming as firefighters tried to put out the flames.
“The fire was very strong and was all over the camp,” he said. “There was darkness and no electricity.”
Sapti said shrapnel from the strike tore up the tent where he was staying with his wife and two children, but that his family was uninjured.
Palestinians mourn over the bodies of relatives killed by the Israeli airstrike, at a morgue in Rafah.CREDIT:AP
“What kind of a tent will protect us from missiles and shrapnel?” he said.
UNRWA, the main United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, described on the social media platform X what it called a horrifying attack and said the images emerging from the site were “yet another testament” that Gaza is “hell on earth”.
Multiple videos from the same location, verified by The New York Times, show fires raging through the night as people frantically pull bodies from the rubble and shout in horror as they carry away charred remains.
By morning, several shed-like structures were flattened, and cars were burnt out, the footage shows. The sheds are part of a displaced persons camp known as the Kuwaiti al-Salam Camp 1.
The Times verified that the locations seen in various videos showing fires raging and burnt bodies were from the same camp, by comparing them to previous videos of the site from aid groups. In a statement on Instagram, one of the groups that supports the camp, Al-Salam Association for Humanitarian and Charitable Works, said that, besides dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, more than 120 tents and dozens of toilets were burnt and damaged, and that a water well was destroyed.
Adli Abu Taha, 33, a freelance journalist who was at a nearby field hospital run by the United Arab Emirates Red Crescent, said the dead and wounded began arriving there shortly after he heard two loud explosions.
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“Several injured arrived without one or more limbs and were severely burned,” Abu Taha said. “The hospital soon became overwhelmed,” he added.
When Abu Taha went to the tent camp in the morning, all he could see was “destruction” coupled with “the smell of smoke and burnt flesh,” he said. He said that some families were dismantling their tents and preparing to find another place to seek shelter.
Dr Marwan al-Hams, who was at the Tal al-Sultan Health Centre in Rafah where many of the casualties first arrived before being transferred to nearby field hospitals, said that of the killed and wounded he saw, a majority were women and children.
“Many of the dead bodies were severely burnt, had amputated limbs and were torn to pieces,” he said.
Mohammed Abu Ghanem, 26, said that he and the 13 other people who had been sheltering in a tent with him in the camp were wondering where to go. “I hear that everywhere is being bombed and I have no cash to pay for the trucks that evacuate people,” he said, adding: “We have no other option but to remain here and wait for death.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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