Tel Aviv — Most people in the densely packed al-Mawasi camp for displaced Palestinians were asleep in the early hours of Tuesday morning when Israeli bombs struck. Homes, possessions, and entire families were blown away in the sprawling refugee settlement, which Israel’s military has designated a “humanitarian zone” along the Mediterranean coast of the Gaza Strip.
“People flew,” Eyad Madi, one of the tens of thousands of people crammed into the camp just west of the city of Khan Younis, told reporters. “It’s indescribable… We had to dig our children out from under the sand.”
Mohammed al-Mughair, an official with the civil defense network in Hamas-run Gaza which has for decades worked to rescue casualties of Israeli strikes, said 40 bodies and 60 wounded in Tuesday’s strikes were taken to nearby hospitals.
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“Our crews are still working to recover 15 missing people as a result of targeting the tents of the displaced in Mawasi,” Mughair told the French news agency AFP.
Civil defense spokesman Mahmoud Basal told the AFP that people in the camp had no warning before the bombs fell, which he said had destroyed “20 to 40 tents” and left three deep craters.
“There are entire families who have disappeared under the sand in the Mawasi Khan Younis massacre,” Basal said.
The al-Mawasi camp is a narrow, eight-mile-long strip of beach-turned-tent city. It is one of the Israeli-designated, United Nations-supported humanitarian zones in Gaza, meant to offer shelter to more than half a million people who have nowhere else to live.
The Israel Defence Forces say it’s also become a hiding place for Hamas fighters. Hamas denies any of its operatives are in the camp, but an IDF statement says it had carried out a precision strike on a number of senior Hamas terrorists operating “within a command and control center embedded in the humanitarian area.”
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There were multiple explosions, according to Ola Al-Shaer, who moved with her family to al-Mawasi to escape fighting elsewhere in Gaza.
“We heard around five or six strikes, one after the other,” she said. “We rushed to help and saw women and children cut to pieces, but there are still people missing.”
The rescue effort started in the pitch dark. There’s not enough electricity in the camp for lighting. Rescuers with flashlights combed through the sand to find anyone left alive.
Hours later, the sun rose to reveal enormous blast craters in the sand littered with what appeared to be pieces of tent frames and scraps of clothing.
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With no heavy digging equipment available to assist in the recovery efforts, crews were still doing their best Tuesday afternoon to find missing victims.
The overnight strikes were among the deadliest to hit al-Mawasi since the war in Gaza began after Hamas terrorists murdered Israelis in an attack last October. Israel’s military said three Hamas commanders who were killed in al-Mawasi on Tuesday were directly involved in that massacre
Pressure mounts on Netanyahu to strike cease-fire deal with Hamas
Even as the grim work to recover the victims of the latest Israeli strike on purported Hamas targets continued, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant told reporters in Tel Aviv that 11 months of war with Israel’s vastly superior military had depleted the militant group to the point that “Hamas as a military formation no longer exists.”
“Hamas is engaged in guerrilla warfare and we are still fighting Hamas terrorists and pursuing Hamas leadership,” Gallant told journalists, according to the AFP.
He appeared to back mounting calls from around the world — including from Washington and from within Israel — for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a multi-stage cease-fire deal with Hamas that would see the 101 hostages still being held in Gaza released as part of a first stage. According to Israeli officials, 35 of those captives have already died or been killed, but their remains not repatriated.
Gallant told reporters Tuesday that a truce agreement would give Israel a chance to address other security challenges. He spoke amid rising concern of a full-scale war along Israel’s northern border, where the IDF and Hamas’ powerful ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah, have traded increasing fire.
Violence has also increased dramatically in the other, much larger Palestinian territory, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where a U.S. activist was fatally shot on Friday by an Israeli soldier, according to eyewitnesses. Aysenur Egyi’s family has called on the U.S. government to carry out an independent investigation into her killing.
Gallant said a deal to bring the remaining hostages home was “the right thing to do,” and that a negotiated truce with Hamas would offer “a strategic opportunity that gives us a high chance to change the security situation on all fronts.”
Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, who has criticized Netanyahu’s handling of the war for months, also urged him to strike a deal again Tuesday, saying in a social media post that any agreement would obviously “have painful prices, but without bringing the kidnapped home, the prices will be much more painful for Israeli society.”
“Everything possible should be done to bring back” the hostages, both living and dead, Herzog said.
Netanyahu is also under intense political pressure from the far-right, nationalist members of his fragile coalition government, however, who have rejected any negotiated truce with Hamas. The prime minister has repeatedly said the war will continue until the hostages are brought home, and Hamas is completely destroyed as a military and political power in the Gaza Strip.
According to the Health Ministry in the territory, which was ruled by Hamas for almost two decades before the current war began, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7. Gazan officials do not differentiate between civilians and combatants in their casualty figures.
Hamas and allied militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in their unprecedented attack 11 months ago. They kidnapped about 250 others, many of whom were released in a prisoner swap with Hamas in November, during the only brief cease-fire in the war negotiated to date.
