At dawn on Thursday, Haitham Abu Ammar sifted through the rubble of the school that had become a refuge for him and thousands of other displaced Gazans. He spent hours helping people piece together the body parts of their loved ones.
“The most painful thing I ever experienced was picking up those pieces of meat with my hands,” said Mr. Abu Ammar, 27, a construction worker. “I never thought I would do something like this.”
An Israeli airstrike on a school building early Thursday killed dozens of people, including at least nine militants, the Israeli military said.
That day, bodies and body parts recovered from the rubble were wrapped in blankets, stacked on truck beds and transported to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the last major medical facility still operating in central Gaza.
The Israeli military said the airstrike was carefully planned. Maj. Gen. Daniel Hagari told reporters that Israeli forces tracked the militants for three days in the school’s converted shelter before opening fire.
“The Israeli military and the Shin Bet found a solution to separate terrorists from asylum seekers,” he said.
But accounts from local and foreign medical personnel and a visit to the hospital by The New York Times on Thursday afternoon made clear that civilians also died.
Outside the hospital morgue, crowds gathered to weep and pray for the deceased. Hospital hallways are packed with people looking for help, or at least a little comfort.
A little girl with bleeding legs screamed: “Mom! Mom!”
The exact death toll could not be verified, but Gaza’s health ministry said the attack killed about 40 people, 14 of whom were children and nine women. Later in the day, the Associated Press reported different figures, citing a hospital morgue saying at least 33 people had died, including three women and nine children.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital has become a symbol not only of the severe loss of life in central Gaza, but also of the growing despair among Gazans struggling to find a place that is still safe.
In the past few weeks, the area has been crowded with people fleeing another Israeli offensive, this time in the southern city of Rafah. Before the attack began, Rafah was a major refuge for civilians, housing at one time more than half of Gaza’s population.
Then on Wednesday, Israel announced it had launched a new operation targeting Hamas militants in central Gaza – where many Gazans who fled Rafah ended up.
The school building was attacked at around 2 a.m. the next morning, in a building run by the United Nations’ main Palestinian aid agency in Gaza, UNRWA.
Since Israel began its offensive on Gaza in October, the schools have been used to shelter Gazans forced from their homes by the fighting in retaliation for Hamas-led attacks on Israel. Israel says Hamas hides its troops in civilian locations such as schools or hospitals, a charge the group denies.
Health workers say 140 people have been killed and hundreds injured at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in new military operations over the past two days.
Karin Huster, a nurse with the international aid group Doctors Without Borders who has been working at the hospital, said: “It’s complete chaos because we have a lot of casualties but the medical supplies to treat them are increasing. The less.
During The Times’ visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque, medical staff could be seen pushing through panicked crowds trying to reach the operating room, but were delayed because of the crowds. Ms. Hastert said that amid the chaos, medical staff sometimes rushed seriously injured people into operating theaters, wasting valuable time for those who still had a chance of survival.
Ms. Hastert said most of the people she has treated over the past few days have been women and children.
Mr. Abu Ammar found himself at the hospital again early Thursday afternoon after burying a friend he rescued from the rubble of his school.
This time he was accompanied by his friend’s brother, who tried to force him into a corridor near the entrance. The younger brother’s face was scratched by shrapnel, and there was also a deep wound on his right leg.
But he’s not the only one in desperate need of help.
They were surrounded by injured people, some lying on the floor covered in their own blood, others lying on their beds crying for help. That morning, a man whose face was covered in burns and dust from the blast begged two relatives who were with him to slap him in the face with a piece of cardboard they waved over him.
In the morgue, the scene of the dead is almost as chaotic as the scene of the living. Bodies were everywhere, and relatives flocked in to cry and scream over the bodies. The smell of blood is too strong.
The crowd outside the morgue ebbs and flows as bodies wrapped in blankets (shrouds are in short supply) are loaded onto pickup trucks for burial. Relatives and friends lined up to pray before the deceased was taken away. Even passers-by on the street stopped to watch.
“When is it too much?” Ms. Hastert said. “I don’t know how to express it without shocking people. What is wrong with human nature?
