Al-Mawasi attack: ‘People were torn into pieces, most of them women and children’
A crater created in the Israeli strikes on a refugee camp in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza, on 10 September 2024
Ahmed Abd el Aziz in al-Mawasi, occupied Palestine and Maha Hussaini in central Gaza report in Middle East Eye on 10 September 2024:
For three hours under the darkness of Gaza’s night sky, search-and-rescue teams dug bodies and survivors out of piles of sand. Eventually, they paused, exhausted, to wait for daybreak and see what else was left.
The teams arrived minutes after Israeli aircraft pounded the area, a place in southern Gaza’s al-Mawasi that Israel had designated a “humanitarian zone”.
Around midnight on Tuesday, bombs dropped on tents housing displaced Palestinians, gouging vast craters into the earth and killing 40 people, according to local authorities.
Eyewitnesses told Middle East Eye that the explosions felt like an “earthquake that rocked the area”. When they stepped outside, they found victims “with amputated limbs” lying on the ground.
“It was around 12.30am or 1am, I was sleeping in the pergola outside my house when suddenly, I saw missiles falling and sand raining down on us. They bombed the area with about four or five missiles,” Alaa Shahda Mahmoud al-Shaer, an elderly resident of al-Mawasi, told MEE. Shaer’s sisters, in-laws and daughters were all staying with him. The Israeli army told Palestinians to move to these so-called “safe” areas, he noted, “so everyone came here. We were shocked by what they did.” Shaer joined the dozens of residents and displaced who began removing the piles of sand and rescuing those buried alive before the civil defence search-and-rescue teams arrived.
“Only God knows how we saved people. We removed the sand and tents off them with our bare hands. It was a struggle to pull out the victims. We tried to rescue the women and children but the sand had covered the tents and people,” he said. “Some tents, we couldn’t even find them – they were completely buried. The civil defence tried to retrieve them during the night but couldn’t, and we are still waiting for them to be recovered.”