The cuts on her feet a strike she survived two weeks earlier had not yet healed, said Asma Al-Sarafendi, before more shrapnel embedded itself in the flesh of her leg during a attack this week in a designated humanitarian zone in southern Gaza.
Wednesday’s strike Al-Mawasi it began shortly after midnight, Al-Sarafendi said, while she was sleeping with her husband and five children – Mouna, Shorouq, Layla, Asaad and Mhamad. They were awakened by aircraft flying overhead before flames engulfed the area around their tent, she told an NBC News crew in Gaza.
“People screaming, people on fire, men taking children out,” said Al-Sarafendi, describing the moments that followed. “We were all injured.”
She and one daughter suffered shrapnel wounds, while another’s scarf melted into her skin, Al-Sarafendi said. Her husband, Abu Mustapha Al-Sarafendi, took his son and another daughter to hospital with burns and shrapnel injuries, she added.
“I don’t have any news about them,” Al-Sarafendi said.
O The Israel Defense Forces repeatedly attacked Al-Mawasi — an inhospitable patch of land north of Rafah that has expanded into a crowded tent city — despite having designated it as a safe humanitarian zone. An NBC News investigation into seven deadly air strikes found that Palestinians were killed in southern areas Gaza which the Israeli military has explicitly designated as safe zones, including Al-Mawasi. In May, 21 people were killed in an attack on the camp, according to Reutersan attack that the Israeli military denied.
The IDF did not respond to a request for comment from NBC News to confirm that it had attacked the Al-Mawasi area on Wednesday.
On Friday, another round of explosions in Al-Mawasi killed at least 25 and injured 50, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, a humanitarian organization, said the attacks occurred just meters from their offices and homes, which are surrounded by hundreds of displaced people in tents. “Firing so dangerously close to humanitarian structures puts the lives of civilians and humanitarians at risk,” the ICRC said. said on X.
The Israeli military said there was “no indication that an attack was carried out by the IDF” inside the humanitarian zone, referring to Friday’s incident, adding that it was under review. According to Associated PressThe blast sites provided by Civil Defense in Gaza and the Red Cross hospital appear to be outside the Al-Mawasi designated humanitarian zone.
Witnesses interviewed by the NBC News team in Gaza after Wednesday’s attack said shots were fired from an aircraft into the camp between 12:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. Then, about five minutes later, came a missile or bomb, which sent shrapnel scattering and lighting fires in the camp.
For Al-Sarafendi, his account of the damage and injuries stretched from the chaos of Wednesday night to the attacks that pushed his family to Al-Mawasi in the first place, as the oppressive regularity of an attack violent mixed with the other.
On June 8, Al-Sarafendi, originally from Rafah, was taking refuge in Nuseirat, in central Gaza, when Israeli forces conducted an operation operation to rescue four hostages, killing at least 270 people, according to Palestinian health authorities. Hundreds more were injured, including Al-Sarafendi. Although Palestinian authorities do not distinguish between civilians and combatants when reporting casualty numbers, 64 children would have died in the attack.
The family then walked from Nuseirat to Al-Mawasi, where his brother had arranged a space for his family.
“This is the humanitarian region where we were asked for refuge,” Al-Sarafendi said tearfully. “My brother saw me, he couldn’t believe I was alive. …He kissed my feet, hugging me and saying, ‘Thank Allah you are safe.’”
Before the war, Al-Mawasi was a small fishing village on the Mediterranean coast of Gaza. The village has become a densely populated tent city since the start of the war, becoming more populous as some of the more than 1 million people sheltering in neighboring Rafah have fled the ground invasion that began there last month.
According to WAFA, the Palestinian news agency, at least seven people were killed in Wednesday’s attack and dozens of others were injured. Video filmed by rescuers and obtained by NBC News showed several people, apparently dead, with blood dripping from their mouths, being pulled from a warehouse engulfed in flames.
In a makeshift morgue, Amu Mhamed Abu Amara mourned the deaths of her family members, including her niece Mariam Mhamed Slimane Abu Amra, whose unborn son, Abu Amara told the NBC News team, had died with her in the attack.
“She had a baby in her belly, she was pregnant,” said Abu Amara. “We were safe in Rafah, and here we are displaced and our homes are gone, our children are gone, there is no safe place in Gaza.”
Another woman assessed the charred remains of her tent.
“Kill us with one blow and we’ll end this,” she told NBC News.
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
