by A populous neighborhood in central Gaza where many Palestinians fleeing the fighting had taken refuge was mourning fresh trauma Monday after Gaza health officials said an overnight attack had killed dozens of people there.
Photos of Monday’s aftermath showed a gray concrete building with dark holes where rooms used to be. At the foot of the building was a mound of rubble, where men appeared to be digging for survivors or bodies.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said 70 people had been killed in Sunday’s attacks in the Al Maghazi neighborhood. But the ongoing difficulty in reaching residents of Gaza, where electricity shortages and communications outages have often obscured the picture of the war’s fallout, made details fuzzy.
Ministry officials blamed Israeli airstrikes for the deaths. Israel’s military said Monday it was reviewing the episode.
The attack underscored the risk to civilians as fighting intensifies. Israeli forces are advancing into central Gaza as they continue to fight Hamas fighters in the north and south of the enclave. Many places in central and southern Gaza are crowded with people who have fled their homes.
“These rockets seem to be made to destroy mountains, not people,” said Mohamed Abu Shaah, who had taken refuge in an acquaintance’s house in Al Maghazi with his wife and seven daughters. In Al Maghazi, he said, the influx of newly displaced people meant that 20 people were routinely crammed into a single room to sleep at night.
It was the fifth time his own family had packed their bags and rushed to a new location after fighting and airstrikes threatened the place where they had taken refuge.
“We are doing everything we can to run for our lives,” he said.
The rising death toll in Gaza, which Health Ministry officials say stands at around 20,000 people, prompted Pope Francis on Monday to focus his Christmas address in part on the plight of Palestinians, as well as the Israeli hostages being held. in Gaza.
He mentioned Bethlehem, the holy city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where officials have largely canceled Christmas festivities in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, and pleaded for peace “to come to Israel and the Palestinian territories, where the war It’s devastating their lives.” towns.”
The Pope also called for “an end to military operations with their terrible harvest of innocent civilian victims” and “a solution to the desperate humanitarian situation by opening up to the provision of humanitarian aid.”
Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the armed group that led the October 7 attacks on Israel that Israeli officials say killed about 1,200 people.
Abu Shaah said he had just returned from prayer on Sunday night and was about to put his daughters to bed in the bed nine of them shared when they heard a loud crash. Afraid of finding themselves under the rubble, they ran down the stairs towards a scene of devastation.
“We’ve seen a lot, but this is beyond what we could have imagined,” he said. “Today my family and I are alive, but what about tomorrow?”
Before the war, about 33,000 Palestinians lived in Al Maghazi, an area covering only about a quarter of a square mile, according to the United Nations agency that helps Palestinians. Most of the families in the neighborhood were originally from villages in central and southern what was Palestine before fleeing or being forcibly displaced in the 1948 war that surrounded the establishment of Israel as a state.
The neighborhood has been attacked several times before, according to UN reports.
Save the Children, an aid group, called the attack on Al Maghazi “another episode of the current horror” in Gaza.
“Families and children are not targets and must be protected,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We need an immediate and definitive ceasefire to end this misery.”
