Israel’s shock bombardment plunged Palestinians again into ‘hell’

The Israeli bombs started falling earlier than daybreak, lighting the sky with orange flares and shattering the stillness. The shock wave of airstrikes plunged Palestinians again right into a nightmare that they had hoped is perhaps behind them.

The bombs crashed throughout Gaza early Tuesday, setting hearth to a sprawling tent camp within the southern metropolis of Khan Younis and flattening a Hamas-run jail. They hit the Al-Tabaeen shelter in Gaza Metropolis, the place Majid Nasser was sleeping along with his household.

“I went out to see the place the bombing was. Abruptly the second strike occurred within the room subsequent to us,” he mentioned. “I heard screaming, my mom and sister screaming, calling for assist. I got here and entered the room and located the youngsters beneath the rubble.” Everybody was injured, however alive.

Palestinians tried to claw our bodies from the wreckage with their naked arms. Mother and father arrived at hospitals, barefoot, carrying youngsters who had been limp and coated in ash. Streets and hospitals full of our bodies.

By noon, over 400 folks had been killed. It was one of many deadliest days of the 17-month struggle, following two months of ceasefire.

Through the truce that started on 19 January, lots of of hundreds of individuals in Gaza had returned to their properties, a lot of them destroyed. A surge of help introduced meals and medicines — till Israel reduce off help two weeks in the past to strain the Hamas militant group into accepting a brand new proposal as a substitute of constant with the truce.

The Muslim holy month of Ramadan had even supplied moments of pleasure as households held communal sundown meals ending every day’s quick with out the concern of bombardment.