Tamara Nassar
The Electronic Intifada / October 6, 2024
Bodies were scattered in pieces, a paramedic said of the scene where an Israeli fighter jet fired missiles at a building in the Tulkarm refugee camp in the northern occupied West Bank on Thursday night.
The shelling killed at least 18 Palestinians, including three children.
“The martyrs are 80 percent body parts,” paramedic Dalia Hadaideh told media.
“We don’t know who the corpses belong to,” she added, explaining that they found “scalp, chest skin, ears, arms, bones, teeth scattered and children’s remains caught on electricity lines.”
Another eyewitness, Ibrahim Abu Zahra, said he saw “charred bodies” and “torn pieces of children and women.”
The search for Palestinians trapped under the rubble of the building continued until the early hours the next day.
Three Israeli missiles penetrated the roof of the building, passing vertically through the third and second floors and landing on the first. The missiles destroyed the building entirely and damaged nearby homes.
Israel was targeting members of Palestinian armed resistance in the camp, who were ostensibly at a cafe on the bottom floor.
“The cafe is frequented by the whole camp,” Yousef Ghurab, an eyewitness, told media. “People come, they drink tea, it’s a public place.”
Nimr Fayed, the cafe’s owner, lost his brother in the shelling.
“It was a bloody scene that reflects the savagery and Nazism of this occupation,” he told Middle East Eye.
Fayed said it was an ordinary evening at the cafe. People had gathered to eat and smoke when Israeli warplanes fired at the building.
There were no clashes between armed Palestinian groups and Israeli forces at the time of the airstrike, which happened without warning.
Seven members of Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, were killed in the strike. The group acknowledged that their commander, Zahi Yasser Oufi, was killed as well.
Family slaughtered
Israel’s airstrikes also killed an entire Palestinian family who lived in an apartment next to the cafe.
Muhammad Abu Zahra and his wife, Saja, were home with their two children Karam Muhammad Abu Zahra, 5, and Sham Muhammad Abu Zahra, 8, when Israel bombed the building.
The bodies of the parents and their young children were found mangled together after an hour of searching, according to a field investigation by the human rights group Defense for Children International-Palestine.
“Karam and Sham, along with their parents, sustained shrapnel injuries and severe burns all over their bodies,” the group said.
Saja’s mother, Amal Khayroush, told Reuters she found out about their killing on social media. Reuters reported a fifth family member was killed in the same attack.
“I was calling Saja, I was calling her husband, my sons, I called my sister who lives near Saja, no one was answering,” Khayroush told Reuters.
“So I started running toward her house in the camp. I didn’t know how I was going to reach the camp.”
The Israeli missiles “penetrated their ceiling and the floor of their kitchen, leaving many of the cabinets incongruously intact,” Reuters reported.
A third child, 16-year-old Muhammad Mamun Anbas, was in the cafe when the Israeli air strike took place.
“His body was completely shattered,” DCIP said.
He was retrieved from under the rubble before being transferred to a nearby hospital, the group added, “where he was pronounced dead on arrival.”
“Children like Karam, Sham and Muhammad grow up in Palestinian communities where Israeli forces regularly carry out military attacks and incursions with complete impunity and demonstrate again and again that nowhere is safe for Palestinian children,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP.
Condemned
The UN human rights office said Israel’s shelling was an example of “unnecessary, disproportionate, and therefore unlawful” lethal force which has become the norm in the occupied West Bank since 7 October 2023.
The Israeli army said it worked with Israel’s domestic torture and assassination secret police agency the Shin Bet to target the men as they gathered, saying they were planning an “immediate” attack against the Israeli state.
Extrajudicial executions have been a cornerstone of Israel’s efforts to repress all Palestinian resistance in the territories it occupies and beyond.
Nearly 700 Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank since 7 October 2023, according to the UN human rights office. Approximately 190 of them were killed by airstrikes.
In Tulkarm alone, 88 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since that day.
The latest Israeli airstrike brings the number of Palestinian children killed in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of the year to 83, including two United States citizens.
Monday will mark one year since Israel launched its genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Since that day, 164 Palestinian children have been killed in the occupied West Bank alone.
Palestinian commentator Mustafa Barghouti described the airstrike as a form of “expanding genocide to the West Bank.”
Tamara Nassar is an assistant editor at The Electronic Intifada
