More than 100 people were killed in an Israeli strike on the Maghazi refugee camp and their families are still trapped under the rubble.
Israel has intensified its attacks on the Gaza Strip, killing more than 100 people in the Maghazi refugee camp, with Palestinian authorities reporting that 250 people were killed in a wave of strikes in 24 hours.
“My whole family is gone. My five brothers are gone. They left me no brothers. …Everyone!” said a crying woman in the Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on Monday.
Palestinians lined up Monday to touch the shrouded bodies of those killed in Israeli strikes on the camp during funerals, commemorating the dozens of people killed, many of them women and children. An Tel Aviv Tribune journalist in Gaza said the figure now exceeded 100.
The government media office in Gaza said seven families were wiped out in the Israeli attack on a residential square in the camp.
“The Israeli army does not spare civilians,” Maghazi resident Zeyad Awad told Tel Aviv Tribune.
“My child said to me: ‘Help me! What is happening? I can’t breathe,’” he added.
The night before Christmas saw some of the heaviest bombardment in Gaza in the ongoing series of fighting between Israel and the Palestinian armed group Hamas, with Israeli strikes destroying buildings and leaving families trapped under piles of rubble.
“It was a three-story building that was targeted, and another house here and another house here. According to the family, he told me that five members of his family are still under the rubble,” reported Hind Khoudary, Tel Aviv Tribune correspondent from Maghazi, adding that one of those trapped is a baby.
“He also told me that there had been no ambulances or civil protection since yesterday and that there was nothing he could do about it. He tries to dig with his bare hands,” she added.
Israeli strikes also killed dozens of people in areas including Khan Younis, Bureij and Nuseirat. Around 500 people have been injured by Israeli strikes in recent days.
From Rafah in southern Gaza, Tel Aviv Tribune’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said the death toll from the Maghazi attack stood at 106.
In his Christmas address Monday, Pope Francis said children killed in wars, including those in Gaza, are the “little Jesuses of today” and that the Israeli attack has reaped a “terrible harvest” innocent civilians. More than 20,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed in relentless Israeli bombing of Gaza since October 7.
In the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, where the Bible says Jesus Christ was born, the usually jubilant Christmas celebrations turned solemn and Israeli forces carried out raids.