Harrowing cell-phone video shows the tiny silhouette of Ward Al-Sheikh Khalil trudging through rubble, her make-shift shelter engulfed in flames around her, after an Israeli strike hit the school where she and her family had fled to escape the war raging around them in the Gaza Strip.
Khalil, just five years old, survived. Her mother and five of her siblings did not make it out of the burning building.
When she returned to the scene of the attack, she found her sister’s abandoned flip-flop and broke down sobbing.
“The fire filled the sky and the ground,” she said. “I was asleep, but I came out from the fire. When I came out, I did not find my dad. They took me to the Baptist Hospital, and I saw dad on the way, in the ambulance. I saw him. He had many wounds on his face.”
The Israeli strike took place in the middle of the night. The Israel Defense Forces said the target was a Hamas command and control center inside the school building.
Rescuers in the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Territory said the strike killed 33 people.
European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen called the attack “abhorrent” on Tuesday during a call with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, according to a readout of the call from the EU cited by the French news agency AFP.
“The expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza targeting civilian infrastructure, among them a school that served as a shelter for displaced Palestinian families, killing civilians, including children, is abhorrent,” von der Leyen said, according to the EU. “The European Commission has always supported — and will continue to support — Israel’s right to security and self-defense. But this escalation and disproportionate use of force against civilians cannot be justified under humanitarian and international law.”
When he heard reports of a strike on the school, he immediately tried to make contact.
“Some pictures were released in the media. When I looked at them, I saw Ward with the Civil Defense. I immediately knew that it was my niece,” he said. “When I came, I saw that the bodies of my brother’s family were all charred and torn to pieces. It took a while to locate the body of her (Ward’s) elder brother, Abed, so that we could bury them all together. It was a horrific scene.”
He worried about the lasting impact of living through such trauma on Gaza’s children, including his niece.
Amid the bombings, Palestinians in Gaza also face a critical struggle to find food, after a nearly three-month-long Israeli blockade on all humanitarian goods entering the territory.
Under pressure from its allies, including the U.S., Israel began allowing some humanitarian goods into Gaza last week, but aid agencies say it’s not nearly enough to meet the needs of the enclave’s roughly 2 million inhabitants.
The newly established U.S.- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation also said it began distributing food on Monday. The GHF said Tuesday that it had distributed a total of about 462,000 meals over two days of operation.
The United Nations and other aid organizations have objected to the group’s methods, calling it a distraction.
“Even when they bring aid, nothing reaches us,” Islam Abu Taemia said while scavenging for food with her child in Gaza this week. “We’re like stray dogs collecting food from trash. If we don’t, we starve.”
