Cuts on her feet from an attack she survived two weeks earlier had yet to heal, Asma Al-Sarafendi said, before more shrapnel pierced the flesh of her leg this week during an attack on a designated humanitarian zone in the south of Gaza.
The attack on Al-Mawasi began just after midnight on Wednesday, Al-Sarafendi said, while she was sleeping with her husband and five children – Mouna, Shorouq, Layla, Asaad and Mhamad. They were awakened by planes overhead before flames engulfed the area around their tent, she told an NBC News crew in Gaza.
“People screaming, people on fire, men taking the children outside,” Al-Sarafendi said, describing the moments that followed. “We were all injured.”
She and a daughter suffered shrapnel wounds, while another’s scarf melted on her skin, Al-Sarafendi said. Her husband, Abu Mustapha Al-Sarafendi, took their son and another daughter to hospital with burns and shrapnel wounds, she added.
“I have no news about them,” Al-Sarafendi said.
The Israeli army has repeatedly struck Al-Mawasi – an inhospitable stretch of land north of Rafah that has become a busy tent city – despite designating it a safe humanitarian zone. An investigation by NBC News into seven deadly airstrikes found that Palestinians were killed in areas of southern Gaza that the Israeli military had explicitly designated as safe zones, including Al-Mawasi. In May, 21 people were killed in an attack on the camp, according to Reuters, an attack that the Israeli army denied.
The IDF did not respond to a request for comment from NBC News to confirm that it had attacked the area in Al-Mawasi on Wednesday.
A new series of explosions in Al-Mawasi killed at least 25 people and injured 50 on Friday, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, a humanitarian organization, said the attacks took place meters from its offices and homes, which are surrounded by hundreds of displaced people in tents. “Shooting so dangerously close to humanitarian structures endangers the lives of civilians and humanitarians,” the ICRC said on X.
The Israeli military said that “there is no indication that an attack was carried out by the IDF” within the humanitarian zone, referring to Friday’s incident, adding that it was under investigation. According to The Associated Press, the locations of the explosions, caused by Gaza Civil Defense and the Red Cross Hospital, appear to be just outside Al-Mawasi’s designated humanitarian zone.
Witnesses interviewed by the NBC News crew in Gaza after the attack on Wednesday said shots were fired from an aircraft at the camp between 12:30 a.m. and 1 a.m. Then, about five minutes later, a rocket or bomb came, shooting shrapnel. spread and caused fires in the camp.
For Al-Sarafendi, her account of the damage and injuries stretched from Wednesday night’s chaos to the attacks that pushed her family to Al-Mawasi in the first place, as the harrowing regularity of one violent attack spilled over into another.
On June 8, Al-Sarafendi, who is originally from Rafah, took shelter in Nuseirat, central Gaza, when Israeli forces carried out an operation to rescue four hostages, killing at least 270 people, according to Palestinian health authorities. Hundreds of others were injured, including Al-Sarafendi. Although Palestinian officials do not distinguish between civilians and fighters when reporting the number of casualties, 64 children are believed to have been killed in the attack.
The family then walked from Nuseirat to Al-Mawasi, where her brother had dug out a space for her family.
“This is the humanitarian region in which they asked us to take refuge,” Al-Sarafendi said through tears. “My brother saw me, he couldn’t believe I was still alive. …He kissed my feet, hugged me and said, ‘Thanks to Allah you are safe.’
Before the war, Al-Mawasi was a small fishing village on the Mediterranean coast of Gaza. The village has grown into a densely populated tent city since the start of the war, becoming increasingly crowded as some of the more than 1 million people who sought refuge in nearby Rafah fled the ground invasion that began there last month.
At least seven people were killed and dozens of others were injured in Wednesday’s strike, according to WAFA, the Palestinian news agency. Video filmed by rescuers and obtained by NBC News showed several people, apparently dead with blood pouring from their mouths, being pulled from a warehouse as it burst into flames.
In a makeshift morgue, Amu Mhamed Abu Amara mourned her relatives, including her niece Mariam Mhamed Slimane Abu Amra, whose unborn child, Abu Amara told the NBC News crew, was killed with her in the attack.
“She had a baby in her belly and she was pregnant,” Abu Amara said. “We were safe in Rafah, and here we are displaced and our houses are gone, our children are gone, there is no safe place in Gaza.”
Another woman assessed the charred remains of her tent.
“Kill us with one blow and let’s end it,” she told NBC News.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
