They were told they were in a safe area. Then came the missiles

When the explosions began Saturday, many residents of the Gaza Strip were sitting down to meager breakfasts, or drinking tea. They were waking up their children, or walking down the road.

Suddenly, the sound of destruction was booming through Muwasi, the once sparsely populated part of southern Gaza where tens of thousands of Palestinians had fled to after the Israeli military declared it safe for civilians.

Despite that designation, Israel struck the area with a barrage of airstrikes Saturday morning, saying it had targeted Hamas’ top military commander and another military leader. Although it remained unclear Sunday whether the main target had been killed, Gaza health officials said more than 90 people were killed in the attack, about half of them women and children, and more than 300 wounded.

During the attack, sand flew high up in the air and came down “like winter rain,” said Ahmed Youssef Khadra, 38, who was having breakfast with his family in their shared tent.

Their tent collapsed on them. Khadra could see bodies hurled this way and that, landing only to be buried in sand, he said. Smothered in sand himself, he said he could barely process what was happening.

“What was that? What happened? What will happen? We didn’t understand,” he said, describing his panic over his four children, who had been in the tent with him. “At a moment like this, you think of one thing— what happened to you, and what might have happened to the people you were with? Have they died?”

For more than five minutes, he said, he could hear explosions, each following the previous one with less than a minute’s pause in between; then fire, smoke, sand, dead people. He said the strikes had hit two encampments with at least 100 tents in each, each tent with a family of seven or eight people, as well as the road running through it and a three-story building nearby.

He said he saw people decapitated by the strikes and others cut in half. When rescuers arrived to help, he said, they, too, were struck by missiles.

Fawzia Al Shaikh, 82, had just gone to wash her hands after having some tea with her son and daughter when half her family’s tent collapsed in the first strike. Her daughter fled in terror; Al Shaikh’s two granddaughters ran toward her, crying, “Where’s Mom?” she recalled.

Al Shaikh was trying to run with them, urging them along since she could not carry them, when another missile hit, blocking their path with flames, she said. She was praying and trying to calm her granddaughters at the same time. Then, she said, another missile fell in front of her, and the smoke made it hard to see where to go.

Somehow they made it a little farther, she said, when a young man found them and helped her move the girls along to an area where ambulances were taking the wounded away. The whole way, she said, “I was praying, repeating the shahada” — the Muslim declaration of faith— “crying, and wishing for death until I fell to the ground.”

Eventually, Al Shaikh saw her daughter, whose hand and leg later had to be amputated, she said. There were many others missing limbs, she said, and many people half-buried in the sand.

“I saw death with my own eyes,” she said. “I had never seen such scenes in my life.”

Many of the wounded were taken by ambulance to the emergency room at Nasser Hospital, where staff members told Scott Anderson, a senior United Nations humanitarian official in Gaza, that they had admitted more than 130 people from the strikes in Muwasi on Saturday.

Already over capacity before the attack, the emergency room soon was treating people on the floor, on benches, on bed frames without mattresses or on mattresses, Anderson said in an interview after visiting the hospital Saturday.

Lacking enough cleaning supplies, the hospital staff members could not disinfect the floor between patients, so they simply washed it down with water, he said.

“You could smell the blood when you walked in,” Anderson said of the hospital. He called it “one of the most horrific things I’ve seen in the nine months I’ve been there.”

Many of the injured appeared to be children, he said, while other people at the hospital were searching— without much luck— for relatives they had lost track of during the strikes. An 18-year-old woman he met still bore the scars of a war injury she had suffered in October, he said. She had survived that, only to be paralyzed from the waist down during Saturday’s strike.

More than 38,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war began October 7, according to Gaza authorities, whose figures do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The Israeli invasion began after Hamas led a cross-border attack on Israel in which, the Israelis say, about 1,200 people were killed.

On Sunday, Israel said it had succeeded in assassinating a senior Hamas commander in the Muwasi strike, although it could not confirm whether Mohammed Deif, the leader of Hamas’ military wing, had been killed, as intended. Both were believed to have been architects of the October 7 attack.

The bloody aftermath of the strike was still playing out Sunday, Khadra said. A huge crater had replaced the encampments, and people were searching for family members among the dead. His four children, ages 3 through 13, were uninjured but still traumatized.

With their tents collapsed, people were trying to salvage whatever they could. Dozens of families had no idea where they would now go or, without access to new building materials, how they would find shelter from the punishing summer sun.

Many families at the hospital told Anderson they were in despair because they had thought Muwasi was relatively safe. Now, that illusion was shattered, he said, yet he expected people to stay in the area— there being almost nowhere else to go in Gaza.

“It’s very hard when you have no answers to give a mother who says, ‘Why can’t we have anywhere safe?’” he said.