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.
“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 said in a statement sent to CBS News and other news organizations that people in the camp had no warning before the bombs fell. He said they 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.” CBS
