Tareq S. Hajjaj
Mondoweiss / July 14, 2024
The Israeli army committed another massacre against displaced Palestinians in tent encampments, this time in the coastal Mawasi area, which Israel had designated as a “safe zone.”
In a crater in the ground almost larger than a schoolyard, a group of young men dig through the sand and pull out the bodies.
“His head is there! His head is there!” someone yells. A man emerges from the hole, carrying a child.
“Who knows who this child is? Who knows his family? Where are his parents?” he calls out.
Behind him are dead bodies and severed limbs scattered across the ground. Some poke out from beneath the sand, half-buried.
When the Israeli army struck the coastal displacement camp in Al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis, there was no rubble. The Israeli-designated “safe zone” was little more than a sea of tents on the beach, so people were buried in the sand instead.
At 10 a.m. on Saturday, while people were starting their day, the Israeli military targeted the area with successive airstrikes, leading to a massacre that, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, has, as of the time of writing, killed 90 people and injured over 300 others. Half of them are women and children, the health ministry says.
Shaima Farwaneh, 16, was near the site of the massacre when it happened. She was preparing to make breakfast for her family when the bombs fell.
People and sand scattered everywhere, limbs that were once attached to bodies flying over their heads.
“A leg hit me, and I saw dismembered bodies a few meters away,” Shaima told Mondoweiss. “I saw a young child screaming. He lost his lower limbs and was crawling on his hands and screaming. The bombs didn’t stop, and suddenly the boy disappeared. I saw how he vanished before me while we ran and lowered our eyes to the ground, unable to do anything but run.”
Shaima describes hearing seven explosions in short succession before it was over. “What a life we live in these tents that we have to see the dismembered bodies of our siblings and families fly over our heads.”
When the ambulance and Civil Defense crews arrived near a well-known crowded market for residents of the area, their vehicles were targeted as well, according to the director of the Civil Defense in Khan Younis, Yamen Abu Suleiman. Two Civil Defense workers were killed in the strike.
Abu Suleiman said that the occupation targeted Al-Mawasi with a large barrage of missiles, which led to many casualties. “The occupation targeted the area more than once to prevent us from any rescue operation,” he tells Mondoweiss, denouncing the silence of the International Committee of the Red Cross over Israel’s prevention of rescue teams from doing their work.
Israel claims that the airstrikes were an attempt to assassinate Muhammad al-Deif, the head of the armed wing of Hamas, Al-Qassam Brigades, as well as the commander of Al-Qassam’s Khan Younis District Brigade, Rafi Salama. The Gaza government media office denies the Israeli claims, emphasizing that they are nothing but a way of diverting the world’s attention from the reality of the massacre the Israeli army committed as part of the genocide of Gaza’s people.
According to local sources, over 80,000 displaced people currently reside in tents in that area.
‘No state does this’
Fawzia Sheikh Youssef, 82, was buried in the sand from the bombing but survived. She describes what she experienced during the massacre as something she had never seen in her entire life. She tells Mondoweiss that she was already displaced during the Nakba of 1948 when she was only 6 years old, coming to the Khan Younis area and staying with her family for two years in a tent. 76 years later, she found herself back where she started, but this time witnessing massacres the likes of which she had never seen even during the Nakba.
“There is no country in all the world that does this to children, women, and civilians,” she says. “This isn’t how wars are.”
Fawzia was eating her breakfast when the bomb ripped through her encampment, demolishing her tent and trapping her underneath it. She found herself covered in sand and trapped inside but was not critically injured. She began crawling on the ground and extricated herself from beneath the tent, eventually escaping to a place far away from the shrapnel and missiles, closer to the main road.
“I saw before my eyes one missile after another descending next to the tents. Missiles I have never seen in my life in all of Gaza’s wars. Isn’t this internationally forbidden? Shouldn’t the civilian population be protected and not face genocide and mass killing? Isn’t this forbidden?”
“They killed young people and old women. They do not respect humans. Aren’t we human?” she continues. “There is nothing to protect us from these missiles. The tents fell on our heads, and I was hit with two pieces of shrapnel in my leg. I may get poisoned, and I did not harm anyone.”
“These are not humanitarian actions,” Fawzia says. “A normal state would know that children have value, and women have value. Their lives are respected. Killing them is forbidden. There are wars. Some countries fight in the world, but not like this. Not like what happens with us.”
‘I left my son and fled from the horror of the bombing’
Samah al-Farra, a survivor of the massacre, says she fled from the horror of the missiles, leaving her son behind without knowing what she was doing. She describes what she saw after the incident as witnessing the horrors of the Day of Resurrection. The sound of the explosions, the panic of the people around her, the stampede in the attempt to escape, women leaving their tents without even wearing their clothes — Samah has to live with witnessing all these brutal scenes.
“People were running. There was sand in our eyes and fire over our heads. I left my son behind me and started running. I found the world turned upside down. The bodies of the martyrs were next to us, cut into pieces. It was a massacre. The fragments, sand, and bodies flew over our heads as we ran,” Samah describes.
She says that if this density of missiles had fallen on fortified buildings, it would have destroyed them. “But what about when they fall on tents whose owners are protected only by a piece of cloth?”
She describes the scene as a shower of missiles falling four times in a row, with more than one explosion occurring during each shower. “We saved ourselves. If we had stayed where we were, we would have been cut up and buried under the sand.”
Media reports have said that the bombs used in the Al-Mawasi attack were JDAMs made in the U.S., which turn highly destructive unguided bombs into more precise missiles.
‘The entire area was overturned‘
Aziza Abu Tahir sits in front of the devastation after the bombing. Scattered bags of flour, gallons of water, vegetables, pillowcases, and utensils litter the area. She owns an oven and sits beside it every day. The women of the camp send their dough to her to bake for a small fee.
“When they dropped the bombs above our heads, all the people were running and screaming and saying that these were incendiary bombs, and this is the first time we have heard a sound like this,” Aziza tells Mondoweiss. “We ran away, and no one knew where to run. Some people went from one direction and were bombed, and some of them went from another direction and survived. But no one knew where they were going.”
As she speaks, a small child is hugging her, the son of her neighbor. Aziza says his mother takes care of orphans, and explains that when the attack started, his mother was bringing some dough for Aziza to bake in order to then resell to get an income for her family. “She was just here, and I baked what she wanted, and she went to sell it. As soon as she walked away, the bombing started. I don’t know where she is now, and I don’t know if she will return. The entire area she was walking in was overturned, and everything was buried.”
Hassan Suleih conducted interviews and provided photography for this report
Tareq S. Hajjaj is the Mondoweiss Gaza Correspondent, and a member of the Palestinian Writers Union
