Mourners pray next to the body of a Palestinian killed in the Israeli attack on al-Mawasi on 10 September 2024. Photo Credit: Reuters

on September 14, 2024

Al-Mawasi attack: ‘People were torn into pieces, most of them women and children’

By Bdv Desk

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 September 10, bombs dropped on tents housing displaced Palestinians, gouging vast craters into the earth and killing 40 people, according to local authorities, the Middle East Eye reported.

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.

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“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 defense 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 defense tried to retrieve them during the night but couldn’t, and we are still waiting for them to be recovered.”

According to Gaza’s civil defense, at least 40 people were killed and 60 others wounded in the attack, which struck without any prior evacuation orders.

“I didn’t see the martyrs, but the young men said there was a woman with her head cut off, children and members of the al-Shaer and Foujo families killed. Everyone who died were ordinary people. We never heard that any of them worked with the resistance before,” Shaer said.

The Israeli army said it targeted a Hamas command center “disguised in the humanitarian area in Khan Younis”, adding that “many steps were taken to reduce the chance of harming civilians, including the use of precision weaponry, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence information”.

It did not share evidence to back up any of its claims and Hamas denied the allegations.

Speaking alongside US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy called the strike “shocking” and said it demonstrated the need for an immediate ceasefire.