In one of the Gaza war’s most horrifying nights, the Israeli army killed nearly 300 women and children

Haaretz News

On Tuesday afternoon last week, the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit released two videos. In the first, a warplane is seen lifting off in the dark, its jet engines leaving being a hypnotic trail of light; that’s followed by a scene of an Apache helicopter pilot checking the munitions on the craft before getting into the cockpit. The second video shows buildings being destroyed in bombing runs, as columns of smoke waft into the sky.

There are no people in the images of the buildings released by the IDF, but on the ground, it looked different. Earlier that day, the bodies and the wounded began arriving at hospitals – by ambulance, in private cars, on donkey carts and carried in the arms of others. The director of Shifa Hospital, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, told Al Jazeera: “This morning there were 50 bodies in the ER and another 30 bodies in the morgue refrigerator. The operating rooms were full, and many of the wounded died before our eyes because we couldn’t treat them.”

Dr. Sakib Rokadiya, a surgeon from the U.K. who was volunteering at the Nasser Hospital, in Khan Yunis, told Associated Press reporters: “What stunned doctors was the number of children… Just child after child, young patient after young patient.”

The AP published an account of the scene that unfolded in the Nasser Hospital’s ER: “One nurse was trying to resuscitate a boy sprawled on the floor with shrapnel in his heart. A young man with most of his arm gone sat nearby, shivering. A barefoot boy carried in his younger brother, around 4 years old, whose foot had been blown off. Blood was everywhere on the floor, with bits of bone and tissue.” Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, an American intensive-care pediatrician volunteering at Nasser, told the news agency that she was “‘overwhelmed, running from corner to corner, trying to find out who to prioritize, who to send to the operating room, who to declare a case that’s not salvageable.'”

The story went on: “Wounds could be easy to miss. One little girl seemed OK – it just hurt a bit when she breathed, she told Haj-Hassan – but when they undressed her they determined she was bleeding into her lungs. Looking through the curly hair of another girl, Haj-Hassan discovered she had shrapnel in her brain.”

Dr. Mohammed Mustafa, an emergency physician from Australia who was volunteering at the Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, talked about those hours in a video posted on social media: “We’ve worked throughout the entire night. The bombing has been nonstop… We’ve run out of all painkillers… There are seven girls getting their legs amputated, no anesthesia… It was mostly women and children, burned head to toe, limbs missing, heads missing. [A man] died on the way to the CT scan…. [The] three girls lying on the bed, they’re his girls. They are now orphaned. Their mother didn’t even make it into the hospital. She was killed along with their other sister… I was here in June, nothing to this intensity… The screams are everywhere… The smell of burned flesh is still in my nose.”

More than a week after the air raid, an attempt can be made to dispel the smoke that arose from the Israeli opening strike, which ended two months of cease-fire in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Health Ministry reported 436 killed in the attack, among them 183 children, 94 women and 34 people over the age of 65. The night between March 17 and 18 is said to have been one of the deadliest since the start of the war.

* * *

The attack started at 2:20 A.M. The testimonies of the local inhabitants are similar. Some had just woken up for the suhoor meal ahead of the daylong Ramadan fast, when the bombs started to fall and panic spread among the Strip’s bone-weary population. The air raids were carried out at dozens of sites simultaneously and apparently lasted a very short time, though it’s highly unlikely that the whole operation took just 10 minutes, as reports in Israel claimed.

The Israeli media went into a swoon over the achievements of the attack. The daily Maariv described it as “one of the greatest preemptive operations in military history.” The report claimed that “more than 300 terrorists were liquidated within a few minutes… thanks to extraordinary cooperation between the Shin Bet [security service] and the air force.”

“Last night,” the paper gushed, “some 300 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists got a surprise visit from air force bombs that landed on their head. The sortie was perfect.” And Channel 12 News headlined: “Hamas taken by surprise, 400 militants killed.”

It appears that the IDF and the Shin Bet focused this time on civilian and political targets and less on the military wing of Hamas. But to date, the official IDF announcements contain the names of only seven individuals who were targeted and killed in that night’s raid: Hamas’ deputy interior minister, Mahmoud Abu Watfa, and three members of the organization’s political bureau: Issam al-Daalis, Mohammed al-Jamasi and Yasser Harb. The IDF and the Shin Bet announced that they also killed Rashid Jahjuh, the head of Hamas’ general security agency, and Osama Tabash, who was the chief of military intelligence in the southern Strip and head of the organization’s surveillance and targeting department. The army published their names in a somewhat celebratory press release with the word “Liquidated” stamped in red.

Other than those names, the IDF was stingy with information about the attack, making do with a general announcement to the effect that: “The IDF and the Shin Bet attacked dozens of terror targets and terrorists from the terrorist organizations across the Gaza Strip. The aim was to degrade the terrorist organizations’ military and governmental capabilities and to remove a threat to the State of Israel and its citizens.”

It’s certainly possible that there are more dead from Hamas or other armed organizations, but it can already be asserted that there were not 300 terrorists, or any number close to that, killed. The number of men below the age of 65 who were killed in the attack stands at 125, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Most of them, it can be assumed, were not terrorists.

Some of the munitions hit tent camps of displaced persons. The United Nations reported at least three cases of tents being hit in Deir al-Balah and in the Mawasi area in the western part of Khan Yunis, as well as in the Tel a-Sultan section of western Rafah. “People were sleeping and they bombed the tents on their head, there are dozens of killed and wounded, most of them children,” an inhabitant of the Khan Yunis tent camp is seen shouting in a video that was posted from that night.

“It was the hardest night of our life, the children were frightened and trembling, we couldn’t see anything because of the horror,” a resident of the Strip said in a UN video. The video shows a large crater where tents stood, and people poking through the heaps of rubble, pulling out a few tomatoes dirtied by the sand, and blankets.