In one of the Gaza War’s most horrifying nights, Israeli army killed nearly 300 women & children
In Gaza City Amani Abu Aker holds the body of her 2-year-old niece Salma, killed during an Israeli strike March 2025
Nir Hasson and Hanin Majadli report in Haaretz on 27 March 2025:
On Tuesday afternoon last week, the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit released two videos. In the first, a warplane is seen lifting off in the dark, its jet engines leaving being a hypnotic trail of light; that’s followed by a scene of an Apache helicopter pilot checking the munitions on the craft before getting into the cockpit. The second video shows buildings being destroyed in bombing runs, as columns of smoke waft into the sky.
There are no people in the images of the buildings released by the IDF, but on the ground, it looked different. Earlier that day, the bodies and the wounded began arriving at hospitals – by ambulance, in private cars, on donkey carts and carried in the arms of others. The director of Shifa Hospital, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, told Al Jazeera: “This morning there were 50 bodies in the ER and another 30 bodies in the morgue refrigerator. The operating rooms were full, and many of the wounded died before our eyes because we couldn’t treat them.”
Dr. Sakib Rokadiya, a surgeon from the U.K. who was volunteering at the Nasser Hospital, in Khan Yunis, told Associated Press reporters: “What stunned doctors was the number of children… Just child after child, young patient after young patient.”
The AP published an account of the scene that unfolded in the Nasser Hospital’s ER: “One nurse was trying to resuscitate a boy sprawled on the floor with shrapnel in his heart. A young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering. A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around 4 years old, whose foot had been blown off. Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue.” Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, an American intensive-care pediatrician volunteering at Nasser, told the news agency that she was “‘overwhelmed, running from corner to corner, trying to find out who to prioritize, who to send to the operating room, who to declare a case that’s not salvageable.'”
The story went on: “Wounds could be easy to miss. One little girl seemed OK – it just hurt a bit when she breathed, she told Haj-Hassan – but when they undressed her they determined she was bleeding into her lungs. Looking through the curly hair of another girl, Haj-Hassan discovered she had shrapnel in her brain.”
Dr. Mohammed Mustafa, an emergency physician from Australia who was volunteering at the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, talked about those hours in a video posted on social media: “We’ve worked throughout the entire night. The bombing has been nonstop… We’ve run out of all painkillers… There are seven girls getting their legs amputated, no anesthesia… It was mostly women and children, burned head to toe, limbs missing, heads missing. [A man] died on the way to the CT scan…. [The] three girls lying on the bed, they’re his girls. They are now orphaned. Their mother didn’t even make it into the hospital. She was killed along with their other sister… I was here in June, nothing to this intensity… The screams are everywhere… The smell of burned flesh is still in my nose.”
More than a week after the air raid, an attempt can be made to dispel the smoke that arose from the Israeli opening strike, which ended two months of cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Health Ministry reported 436 killed in the attack, among them 183 children, 94 women and 34 people over the age of 65. The night between March 17 and 18 is said to have been one of the deadliest since the start of the war.
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The children of the Abu Daqqa family. All but the two at the far right died in the bombing 18 March 2025, along with their parents
The attack started at 2:20 A.M. The testimonies of the local inhabitants are similar. Some had just woken up for the suhoor meal ahead of the daylong Ramadan fast, when the bombs started to fall and panic spread among the Strip’s bone-weary population. The air raids were carried out at dozens of sites simultaneously and apparently lasted a very short time, though it’s highly unlikely that the whole operation took just 10 minutes, as reports in Israel claimed.
The Israeli media went into a swoon over the achievements of the attack. The daily Maariv described it as “one of the greatest preemptive operations in military history.” The report claimed that “more than 300 terrorists were liquidated within a few minutes… thanks to extraordinary cooperation between the Shin Bet [security service] and the air force.”
“Last night,” the paper gushed, “some 300 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists got a surprise visit from air force bombs that landed on their head. The sortie was perfect.” And Channel 12 News headlined: “Hamas taken by surprise, 400 militants killed.”
It appears that the IDF and the Shin Bet focused this time on civilian and political targets and less on the military wing of Hamas. But to date, the official IDF announcements contain the names of only seven individuals who were targeted and killed in that night’s raid: Hamas’ deputy interior minister, Mahmoud Abu Watfa, and three members of the organization’s political bureau: Issam al-Daalis, Mohammed al-Jamasi and Yasser Harb. The IDF and the Shin Bet announced that they also killed Rashid Jahjuh, the head of Hamas’ general security agency, and Osama Tabash, who was the chief of military intelligence in the southern Strip and head of the organization’s surveillance and targeting department. The army published their names in a somewhat celebratory press release with the word “Liquidated” stamped in red.
Other than those names, the IDF was stingy with information about the attack, making do with a general announcement to the effect that: “The IDF and the Shin Bet attacked dozens of terror targets and terrorists from the terrorist organizations across the Gaza Strip. The aim was to degrade the terrorist organizations’ military and governmental capabilities and to remove a threat to the State of Israel and its citizens.”
It’s certainly possible that there are more dead from Hamas or other armed organizations, but it can already be asserted that there were not 300 terrorists, or any number close to that, killed. The number of men below the age of 65 who were killed in the attack stands at 125, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Most of them, it can be assumed, were not terrorists.
Some of the munitions hit tent camps of displaced persons. The United Nations reported at least three cases of tents being hit in Deir al-Balah and in the Mawasi area in the western part of Khan Yunis, as well as in the Tel a-Sultan section of western Rafah. “People were sleeping and they bombed the tents on their head, there are dozens of killed and wounded, most of them children,” an inhabitant of the Khan Yunis tent camp is seen shouting in a video that was posted from that night.
“It was the hardest night of our life, the children were frightened and trembling, we couldn’t see anything because of the horror,” a resident of the Strip said in a UN video. The video shows a large crater where tents stood, and people poking through the heaps of rubble, pulling out a few tomatoes dirtied by the sand, and blankets.
Bisan al-Hindi, a smiling girl with a pink ribbon in her hair, was killed with her brother Ayman in the attack on Khan Yunis. “Beautiful, gentle Bisan was loved by everyone,” her mother said, eulogizing her. “How glowing her face was. I miss her so much, her dimples, her wide eyes, like the eyes of a doe. Her hair with the fragrance of amber. Beloved of my heart, please come to me in a dream. I will try to sleep only in order to dream of you.”
Of her son, Ayman, she said: “Ayman the polite, the modest, the honest and the faithful, the most innocent boy. Parting with you shattered me. You are my soul, my support. My heart burns. God, how I thanked him every day I saw you growing in front of me. You remember, my beloved, how you stood next to me and said, ‘I’m taller than you now,’ and laughed? Another few days and I would have seen you in university, taken pride in you. Especially after you made me happy when you told me, not long before you were killed, that you wanted to be a doctor of psychology, like the husband of Aunt Ala. My heart filled with pride and joy. Do you know that I wiped your blood with my dress? I will never wash it.”
No fewer than 17 members of the Jarghoun family were killed when a house in Rafah was bombed. Ramadan Abu Luli told Haaretz that his sister was killed in an attack along with her husband and her three daughters. “Two missiles were fired at the house,” Abu Luli related. “Four brothers were killed with their wives and children. The grandfather and grandmother were also killed. All the brothers in that family lost their homes in the war, so they moved into their parents’ home. Now the bombs reached them too.”
Ramy Abdu heads the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor organization. That night he lost his sister Nesreen al-Jamasi and her husband Mohammed, and their children Layan and Omar. Their eldest son, Ubaida, was also killed, together with his wife, Malak, and their daughter Siwar and son Mohammed – her photograph sitting on a small armchair amid the rubble had gone viral.
The family was together in one house in the Khan Yunis area. “Just a week ago Siwar was supposed to go to kindergarten,” Abdu said. “Israel killed her and the whole family. Why? And my nephew Omar, who dreamed of becoming a businessman and traveling all over the world. Why?” Of his niece Layan, 14, Abdu related that she was “the star of the house, ‘Lola,’ we called her. She was displaced for more than a year, living in tents. When I would ask where she was, I was always told that she had gone to work. She collected children from nearby tents and formed a class. She became ‘Miss Layan,’ the beloved teacher among the ruins.”
Palestinian sources that were tracking the night’s attacks found that there had been 80 assaults on some 30 targets. The largest number of people killed was in Gaza City (156), followed by Rafah (106). Whole families were wiped out: 27 members of the Qreikeh family in Gaza City’s Shujaiyeh neighborhood, including a well-known artist in the Strip, Durgham Qreiqeh; seven members of the Slayeh family; and nine from the Abu Tir family, four of whom are still buried under the rubble.
Bisan al-Hindi, a smiling girl with a pink ribbon in her hair, was killed with her brother Ayman in the attack on Khan Yunis. “Beloved of my heart, please come to me in a dream,” her mother said, eulogizing her. “I will try to sleep only in order to dream of you.”
The target of the attack on the al-Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City was apparently the same Mohammed al-Jamasi (brother-in-law of Ramy Abdu), whom the IDF stated was “chairman of the Emergency Committee of the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip.”
But in the assault on the neighborhood, the home of the al-Hattab family was also hit, and 27 of the family’s 28 members were killed, according to Palestinian sources. It’s not clear whether the family was killed in the attack that targeted al-Jamasi or another individual. Samia al-Hattab, in her 30s, the sole survivor, said a missile struck the house when the family had sat down for the suhoor meal.
The missile that killed Naji Abu Seif, known as “Abu Hamza,” the spokesman of Islamic Jihad’s military brigade, also killed his wife and his brother.
In another lethal attack, 25 people who were sheltering in the Al-Tabeen School in Gaza City were killed, the Palestinians said. A Palestinian journalist documented a boy rummaging in the ruins, looking for items that belonged to his dead schoolmates. “I saw a lot of body parts and blood, and I went into a classroom because I was so afraid,” the boy related.
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A statement from UNICEF, the United Nations children’s fund, said that the number of children killed on March 18 made it “one of the largest single-day child death tolls in the last year.” The UN Human Rights Office noted: “Using explosive weapons with wide-area effects in such densely populated areas will almost certainly have indiscriminate effects and is very likely to be in violation of international humanitarian law… and is not consistent with Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law.”
Another photograph became a symbol of this air strike: In it we see a dead baby girl wearing a white onesie decorated with colorful arches, lying on the body of a woman who is on an orange stretcher, both of them barefoot. Alon-Lee Green, national co-director of the Jewish-Arab social movement Standing Together, recognized the infant’s clothes. It was part of a shipment of clothing the organization sent to Gaza about two months ago.
The baby, Banan al-Salut, was not yet three months old at the time of her death; her parents and eight other family members were also killed in the attack in Deir al-Balah. It’s not clear whom the strike was targeting.
Another photograph that circulated widely depicts the seven children of the Abu Daqqa family of Khan Yunis sitting together, each of them drinking an orange beverage with a straw. Apart from the two children on the right, Amir Islam and Zain Islam, all the others were killed: Umar Osama, Mohammed Ahmed, Hala Ahmed, Sama Ahmed and Qusay Aadal. In a conversation with a relative, Ahmed Abdullah, he noted that three other children from the family, who aren’t in the photo, were also killed. In the predawn hours of Friday, he says, six houses belonging to the family were bombed simultaneously.
The youngest survivor of the Abu Daqqa family is Ayla, one month old. “On the morning of the massacre day she was pulled out in good condition after five hours under the rubble,” Abdullah relates. “But her father, Osama Abu Daqqa, her mother Marwa and her brother Umar were all killed. I don’t know if she is fortunate to have survived or unfortunate.”
Whole families were wiped out: 27 members of the Qreikeh family in Gaza City’s Shujaiyeh neighborhood, including a well-known artist in the Strip, Durgham Qreiqeh; seven members of the Slayeh family; and nine from the Abu Tir family, four of whom are still buried under the rubble.
The videos from the Strip that began being uploaded on the morning of March 18 were among the most horrific since the start of the war. The sole of the foot of a child in a bag, a father embracing his dead daughter’s body, a father looking for his two children among bodies in a morgue, a person in his death throes beneath the rubble of his home, and the bodies of children of every age and every posture, among the ruins and in morgues.
In one clip a mother cries out: “I swear that my children died hungry, they didn’t get to eat the suhoor.” Another video shows a father embracing his dead daughter who is wearing red pajamas, blood still trickling from her nose, and screaming, “These are their targets?”
There’s also a clip showing the bodies of two children, a wounded child getting out of an ambulance and women crying over the bodies of their loved ones. “These scenes were repeated, with all their cruelty and harshness,” wrote the Al Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat, one of the most prominent reporters in the Strip during the war. “Loss and pain have returned. The cruel moments that make us cry every day have returned.” On Monday of this week Shabat was killed when a missile struck his car. The IDF afterward presented documents according to which he underwent military training in Hamas five years ago.
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The attacks came nearly three weeks after the imposition of a total siege on the Strip – the longest since the start of the war. No food, fuel or aid has entered the Gaza Strip since March 2. Israel also cut off the electricity supply to the Strip’s principal desalination facility, thus significantly reducing the amount of water available to the population.
“This population has been starved for 15 months,” Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an American physician working at Nasser Hospital, in Khan Yunis, told ABC News. “The population as a whole was losing weight, didn’t have enough protein intake…. I’ve eaten meat once since I’ve been here… and I’m eating better than anybody else in this territory – I have money. But there’s just no meat available. Eggs are more than a dollar each…. That means that people are coming in hungry, thirsty – there’s no clean water anymore… Kids have gastroenteritis all the time. We actually had a woman’s heart stop in the ICU because her gastroenteritis was so bad… There are two million people here, half of them are children, they can’t survive in a place where all the farmland has been destroyed, the sewage system has been destroyed, the water sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed, most of the housing has been destroyed. How does anyone expect them to live?”
The health system in Gaza is in dire straits. In the northern section of the Strip, only one oxygen generator remains, one CT device and one X-ray machine. According to the UN, the medical teams are having to launder sterile gauze pads in order to reuse them. “If we have another one or two mass-casualty events like this, I’m pretty sure we’ll be out of surgical material to work with,” Dr. Sidhwa said.
The IDF Spokespersons Unit issued the following statement to Haaretz: “The IDF operates according to international law and the values of the IDF, and acts to reduce harm to civilians as far as possible, including in complex combat conditions in the face of a terrorist organization that uses the population as a human shield. On the date noted by the reporter, the IDF attacked dozens of terror targets and terrorists, including Mohammed Jamasi and Yasser Mussa, senior terrorists from the political bureau of the Hamas terrorist organization. As is customary, claims of harm to civilians on a broad scale are examined by the relevant apparatuses.”
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