An Israeli airstrike that hit a house in a Gaza refugee camp killed at least 10 Palestinians from the same extended family overnight, eight of them children, according to witnesses. A 5-month-old infant was pulled from the rubble alive.
Palestinian officials and neighbors said the house in the Shati camp had been attacked with no warning. In a statement on Saturday afternoon, the Israel Defense Forces said that it had “attacked a number of Hamas terror organization senior officials, in an apartment used as terror infrastructure in the area of the Al Shati refugee camp.”
The father of four of the children who died, Mohammed al-Hadidi, told reporters that his wife and their five sons had gone to Shati to visit her brother for Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic feasting holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
“They were sleeping in their homes,” Mr. al-Hadidi said, speaking to Shehab, a news agency linked to Hamas. “They weren’t holding weapons, they weren’t firing rockets and they weren’t harming anyone.”
Shati is a crowded refugee camp north of Gaza City along the Mediterranean coast. With its jumble of buildings and alleyways beside the sea, Shati, also known as Beach camp, is the third-largest of the Gaza Strip’s eight refugee camps.
Initially home to 23,000 refugees who fled Lydda, Jaffa, Be’er Sheva and other areas of Palestine in 1948, the camp has since grown to house more than 85,000 people. All of them reside in an area of about a fifth of a square mile, making it one of the most crowded places in the world, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, known as Unrwa, which works with Palestinian refugees.
Al Jazeera broadcast video of rescue teams using earth-moving trucks to clear the rubble of the home. Rescue workers were also seen climbing around the rubble in search of survivors, while graphic footage showed medics evacuating the bloodied victims.
At the edge of the rubble, under the harsh lights of the rescue teams, was Mr. al-Hadidi, howling at the ruins where his children’s bodies had been found. In one video of the scene posted on social media, he sways while several other men hold him up.
On Saturday afternoon, the rescue work had stopped, and the rubble from the house had been pushed to either side of Al-Soussi Mosque Street. Residents of the four neighboring homes were sweeping up the shattered glass and debris. Though they were so close to the house that was struck that they were nearly touching it, the other buildings were comparatively undamaged, suggesting a precision strike.
Airstrikes on Gaza had intensified after midnight, and when the missiles struck the home at about 2 a.m., some people in the neighborhood were awake, glued to the news.
News media footage on Saturday morning showed Mr. al-Hadidi visiting his infant son in the hospital, holding his small hand and kissing him as the child wails. “Oh, love,” he says to the infant, Omar. “Thank God, love.”
“This is an oppressive world that is standing by watching us and our children while massacres are taking place,” Mr. al-Hadidi said in the Shehab interview.
