No al-Najjar hospital, in the border city of Rafah, in Gaza, the remnants of body parts arrived in bags with scribbled numbers on top. Written by the rescuers who had just removed the limbs from the rubble, the numbers meant the estimated number of people they thought might be inside each bag.
“The mutilated pieces of human flesh are so damaged that it was impossible to identify them properly,” said Amjed*, a city resident who visited the hospital on Monday. He went from hospital to hospital, bomb site to bomb site, trying to separate the missing from the dead after the fierce attack on the city by Israel.
“The first bodies that arrived at the hospitals were all of children and women. There were so many bodies on the ground,” he told The Independent.
“The scene was catastrophic. I saw torn pieces of children.”
Other children were transported to the hospitals in civilian cars, without their families, “covered in blood and dust.”
“I tried to ask a boy what his name was to find his family, he couldn’t speak and was shaking a lot.”
On Monday night, Israel launched a ground and air attack on Rafah while freeing two Israeli-Argentine hostages held there by Hamas militants. The two men – identified as Fernando Simon Marman, 60, and Louis Hare, 70 – are among the more than 250 people that Hamas captured during Israel’s bloody attack in southern Israel on 7 October, triggering Israel’s war on Gaza.
Israeli military said it stormed a second-floor apartment using explosives, engaged in gunfire with those holding the hostages and then launched air strikes to allow the extraction of their forces.
“Only continuous military pressure, to total victory, will prompt the release of all our hostages,” said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday morning. “We will not miss any opportunity to bring them home.”
Officials from the Palestinian health ministry said the bombing killed at least 67 Palestinians, including women and children. City residents said they heard dozens of blasts throughout the city and that three mosques and more than a dozen houses were hit.
Now, many in Rafah fear this is just the beginning of a broader attack, said Youssef, 35, who was forced to flee his home in northern Gaza and now lives in a tent in a primary school courtyard.
He said families are worried that Israel will use the extraction of the hostages as “a reason to justify an invasion of Rafah,” a plan Israel has been unwavering in pushing ahead with, despite global uproar.