The Electronic Intifada 16 October 2024
A man inspects the damage after an Israeli attack on tents sheltering the forcibly displaced in Mawasi on 10 September.
APA imagesMaysoon Tumeih, 38 years, was sitting one night in September chatting with her oldest sister, Weam.
Their tents were about 100 meters apart in the Mawasi area of Khan Younis, where they had both sought shelter with their families after being forcibly displaced.
They were remembering their lives before October 2023.
Weam told her sister how much she missed her house and her neighborhood in the Beach Refugee Camp and the lovely people there she left behind eight months ago.
She will never see her home or those neighbors again.
On 10 September Israel launched an air raid on the area, dropping what the rights group Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported as “three American-made MK-84 bombs on a group of displaced people sleeping in their tents in the Mawasi area.”
The strikes killed at least 40 civilians sleeping in their tents and injured over 60.
Maysoon had just laid down to sleep, somewhere after midnight, when she heard several successive explosions in less than a minute that shook the ground and felt to her like an earthquake, she told The Electronic Intifada.
Smoke, dust and sand filled the tent, and Maysoon’s children awoke, frightened to the core, and immediately sought her arms.
Her husband, Muhammad, went to see what had happened and learned from someone that the tent of his sister-in-law’s family was one of twenty tents that disappeared with their occupants.
Maysoon and her children heard the conversation from the tent and she rushed to follow Muhammad.
Scene of slaughter
In the dark, Maysoon stumbled.
“I fell on the ground next to a body that was torn in half but still alive. I screamed in fear when he moved his hands towards me, pleading with me to rescue him,” she told The Electronic Intifada..
She felt like vomiting at a sight, she said, that “will not leave me until my death.”
Her husband heard her screams and came running. When he saw the injured person, he took him over his shoulder and carried him to an ambulance. He held the man’s severed legs in one hand.
Maysoon tried to stand but had to wait until her husband returned to help her up.
Shaking out of fear for the fate of her sister and her family, Maysoon made her way to where she had sat not an hour earlier.
There was nothing there except three holes, meters deep.
Maysoon, her husband and children began digging with their hands searching for any trace of the bodies of their loved ones.
Around them they saw emergency crews pulling out the bodies and parts of bodies of at least 40 people. Some were missing limbs, some were just scattered parts identified only by their clothes by relatives.
Meanwhile, Maysoon’s search had yielded several body parts and one man whose leg was bleeding heavily and who had been blown meters away from his own tent. While they managed to save his life, there was no trace of Weam or her family.
Despite slowly realizing that her sister and her relatives had likely been incinerated in the blast, Mayzoon didn’t move from her spot until dawn. Then she decided to look further afield and began searching in a wider and wider area.
After ten hours, Maysoon returned to her tent griefstricken.
The stuff of nightmares
Rami Ahmed, 32, woke up to the kind of heavy explosions that he hadn’t heard before.
Confused, he couldn’t see anything for a few minutes as gray reddish smoke covered the area.
As the smoke slowly cleared, he found himself out of his tent and on the ground. He concluded, he told The Electronic Intifada, that he must have been blown meters out of his tent by the force of the explosion.
He quickly checked, but had only minor injuries to his hands.
Still in a daze, he got to his feet and rushed to the site of the explosions. When he got close he saw to his shock that scores of tents, some 300 meters away from his location, had vanished as if they had never existed.
His heart raced. Some of those tents belonged to people he had gotten to know when he and his family had first been displaced to the Mawasi area.
He had built friendships with several other men of his age with whom he would spend time on the beach in the evenings.
Most of them were killed.
“I recognized one of them from his curly brown hair and his favorite top, which had worn the night before. I recognized another just from a fake sticker tattoo on his arm,” he said.
But the worst was yet to come, Ahmed said.
“I found one buried up to his neck. When I tried to pull him up with the help of some rescue workers, we realized there was only a torso, upper limbs and a head,” he said.
The horror was clear from everyone’s faces.
Men, women and children stood and stared, Ahmed said, many frozen in shock. Some collapsed from the sight of the many dismembered bodies.
A child nearby was crying, asking himself out loud: “When will we stop losing our loved ones?”
Ahmed went to comfort him. The child told him that he had friends his age living in this location. He used to play football with them and ride the bicycle belonging to one of them.
“The child showed me his friend’s bicycle. It had been burned to gray,” Ahmed recalled. “It had fallen near a tree where his friend’s top was hanging from one of the branches.”
It was like this all night, Ahmed said. Clothes, toys and belongings were scattered everywhere amid the limbs and human remains.
He found a friend’s leg, recognizable from the jeans it was still clad in, his friend’s favorite.
“ I haven’t been able to sleep well since the massacre,” Ahmed told The Electronic Intifada.
“What I saw that night I see when sleeping. I see my killed friends as well. I haven’t been back to the beach since. I feel lonely without them.”
Amputated finger
It was not the sounds of the explosions that woke Ali Ismael, 40.
Ismael had been sleeping so soundly – out of pure exhaustion, he said – that he didn’t even notice his tent was ablaze. He only woke to the sounds of men screaming while trying to extinguish the fire with bowls of water.
Terrified, he rushed out, searching for his wife and sons. Then he heard his son, Muhammad, 7, screaming from inside the tent.
Ismael dove back into the tent to rescue his son. But the boy had already been burnt so badly that the skin in some places had peeled away to the bone.
He rushed Muhammad to one of the ambulances that had arrived at the scene and they rushed him to the nearest hospital for treatment.
At 2 am, he left Muhammad with a relative and returned to find his youngest son, Rami, and his wife.
The fire had been extinguished, their belongings burned,or covered with blood. But he didn’t find any trace of them inside the tent.
Not far from the tent were three craters left by the strikes. He began digging until he came upon the corpse of Rami, 5. He could recognise the corpse because Rami had had a finger amputated as a result of an injury he sustained in another bombing during this genocide.
Ismael collapsed to the ground crying, he told The Electronic Intifada.
“They ordered us to come to Mawasi only to humiliate us, starve us and then kill us.”
He never found his wife.
Khuloud Rabah Sulaiman is a journalist living in Gaza.
