Women, Children Torn to Pieces

GAZA STRIP (Dispatches) -- 
Israeli airstrikes on a so-called “humanitarian zone” in southern Gaza’s Al-Mawasi martyred at least 40 people on Tuesday, local health authorities said.
The strikes targeted at least 20 tents sheltering displaced Palestinians in the coastal area near the city of Khan Younis.
Eyewitnesses said at least five rockets fell in the area, with emergency services saying the strikes created craters up to nine meters deep.
The Zionist military alleged that the strike targeted Hamas leaders, but Hamas denied it, saying “the claims of the fascist occupation army about the presence of resistance elements at the targeted site are a blatant lie”.
Gaza’s civil defense search-and-rescue organization said that the Israeli military used “heavy concussion missiles” and estimated that it was “one of the most horrific massacres since the beginning of the Israeli war on Gaza”.
Um Mahmoud, a displaced Palestinian in Al-Mawasi, described seeing women and children “torn to shreds” after the strikes.
“We have been here for nine months, we have not seen a single resistance member entering the area,” Mahmoud told Middle East Eye.
Alaa al-Shaer, who has been staying in the displacement camp with his family, said he had a message to Zionists “conducting a genocide against us”.
“I have my sister, my sons, my daughters. Would I logically put between them someone wanted by the Israelis? This does not make sense,” he said.
“The Israelis said, ‘go to the safe areas’ and that is what people did,” he added.
Footage from the direct aftermath showed Palestinians desperately digging for their loved ones in the deep craters, with the civil defense saying “entire families” had “disappeared” in the sand.
As the sun rose, more people headed to the area to try to support rescue efforts. Others were looking through the remains of their tents, in apparent attempts to salvage anything from them.
Those trying to leave struggled to work their way through the giant craters left in the ground.
Tearfully standing outside Khan Younis’ Nasser Hospital, a woman mourned her sister, who was killed in the attack.
“My sister was martyred, she was 35 years old,” she said. “Her husband disappeared when the Israelis took him six months ago.”
The woman, who was just a street away from her sister’s tent, said she is survived by six daughters and two sons.
“How can you see a girl orphaned? No mother, no father, no grandparents, no one,” she said.
Nearly all of Gaza’s population of 2.1 million have been repeatedly displaced due to ongoing Israeli
 attacks, with many of them forced to flee to what Israel describes as a “humanitarian zone” in the southern part of the enclave.
The Zionist regime repeatedly reduces the area designated as a humanitarian zone, claiming some places in it were used by Hamas, forcing Palestinians to move to an ever-shrinking area that has also been bombed by Israel in the past.
Human rights groups and UN experts have accused Israel of collective punishment against Palestinians. Since last October, Israeli forces have martyred more than 41,000 Palestinians in the enclave, the majority of whom are women and children.
The fresh carnage came as a campaign to vaccinate a final 200,000 children in north Gaza against polio began on Tuesday although health and aid officials said the operation was complicated by access restrictions, evacuation orders and shortages of fuel.
The campaign in north Gaza follows the vaccination of more than 446,000 Palestinian children in central and south Gaza earlier this month.
Vaccination centers are in areas that are militarily very active, difficult to reach and isolated if things go wrong, Sam Rose, a deputy director of UNRWA, told Reuters.
“There are some nerves, but we’ll have to make it work,” he said.