Their faces contorted with pain, relatives mourned two children killed in overnight Israeli strikes on Gaza, leaning over small bodies on the pavement wrapped in sheets, one stained blood red.
In the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza on Wednesday, Palestinians combed through piles of broken cement in a house flattened by an air strike, trying to salvage what they could.
“We had dinner and sat down, and then it was as if Judgment Day had come. All these stones were on top of us,” Muneer Mayman told AFP in the morning, pointing to a pile of cinder blocks and concrete under which he had been found.
“We lay there for more than two hours while they were removing the rubble from over us.”
Behind him, men and children were at work sifting through debris, hauling off belongings wrapped in blankets for lack of bags or wheelbarrows.
In south Gaza’s Khan Yunis, an elderly woman held her face between her hands as she sat by a few utensils relatives had salvaged from rubble, an AFP journalist saw.
Nuseirat’s Al-Awda hospital reported at least 31 people killed in the strikes that broke the relative peace brought by a ceasefire that began on October 10.
Gaza’s civil defence agency said that 101 people including 35 children were killed since the strikes began, a figure confirmed by an AFP tally of medical officials in five hospitals.
– ‘What we feared most’ –
Jalal Abbas, a 40-year-old displaced man living in a tent in the central city of Deir al-Balah, told AFP he fears the war will return for good.
“The return of war is what we feared most. I expected the escalation and bombardment to resume because Israel always creates pretexts,” he said.
“Every day they threaten to bring back the war, using the issue of the bodies as an excuse — it’s all lies,” he added.
Abbas was referring to Israel’s declaration that Hamas broke the terms of the US-brokered ceasefire deal by not returning the bodies of deceased hostages quickly enough.
Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday the military had launched the strikes “in response to the attack on soldiers and the blatant violation of the agreement to return the abducted missing”.
At least one Israeli soldier was killed in clashes on Tuesday.
In Khan Yunis, members of the civil defence, a rescue force acting under Hamas authority, had been searching by flashlight through the rubble through the night.
Women wailed as the rescuers took away the bodies of deceased relatives on stretchers, before search and rescue teams moved on to the next site, a plot of land where two tents were struck.
– ‘Rebuild our lives’ –
In north Gaza’s Al-Shati camp too, bombardments tore through the night.
“We had just started to breathe again, trying to rebuild our lives, when the bombardment came back — bringing war, explosions and death,” Khadija al-Husni, 31, told AFP.
Husni also lives in a tent, having been displaced at least once like nearly all Gazans after two years of war.
She deplored the ambiguity of the current ceasefire, which has been sporadically broken by Israeli air strikes or fighting with Hamas since its beginning.
“Either there is a truce or a war — it can’t be both. The children couldn’t sleep; they thought the war was over,” Husni said.
“Are we condemned to live in endless suffering?”
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© Agence France-Presse
