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This was not the first time that displaced Gazans camping on the grounds of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital awoke to Israeli strikes on the place where they were trying to find safety. But Monday’s strike overshadowed any they had survived before: flames jumping from tent to tent, shrieks of agony and bodies so charred they were unrecognizable.
“It is like living inside a recurring nightmare. Every time we sleep, we wake up to this same scenario of tents struck, people screaming,” said Mahmoud Wadi, a 20-year-old whose extended family had been living on the hospital grounds for months.
Mr. Wadi said this was the seventh strike on the hospital his family had witnessed since setting up a tent outside the facility. This time, instead of awakening in a daze to the sight of smoke rising from one spot in the camp, the heat of flames was everywhere, he said. He saw bodies “scorched and black, like giant lumps of coal.”
The Wadi family is one of scores of families that have set up camp in the parking lot of the compound, hoping that international laws prohibiting attacks on hospitals made the area a safe place to shelter. Instead, these families say, they have survived repeated strikes on the hospital. The latest attack, shortly after 1 a.m. on Monday, triggered a fire that set the camp ablaze.
The Israeli military said in a statement posted to social media that it had been targeting a Hamas command center located near the hospital. The fire that erupted afterward was likely caused by secondary explosions, it said.
Survivors interviewed amid the smoldering remains of the camp told The New York Times that the fast-moving fire had been fueled by the explosions of families’ cooking gas canisters and flames that fed off their plastic tents.
“The most difficult scene you can experience is seeing your neighbors burning alive and not being able to do anything to rescue them,” said Abed Musleh, a 25-year-old who fled northern Gaza and was sheltering in a tent in the parking lot with his wife, two children, and his four sisters. He estimated the fire burned at least 30 tents. Residents scrambled to find any buckets not burned in the blaze to try and help rescuers put out the fire.
The Palestinian health authority said four people died and over a dozen were injured, but that the death toll would likely rise. Later Monday, Doctors Without Borders, which has medics operating in Gaza, said five people were killed and dozens were wounded, some with severe burn injuries.
Despite the repeated strikes, Mr. Musleh had no plans to leave. He cannot find anywhere else to go, he said, and he still couldn’t imagine that any other place would be safer than a hospital.
Israel has come under repeated criticism for hitting civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, during the yearlong war in Gaza. A U.N. report last week accused Israel of a deliberate policy to destroy the health care system. The Israeli military has said it acted on information that Hamas was operating from the hospital compound, and it has repeatedly said that it tries to avoid civilian casualties.
But for Gaza’s two million people, an increasingly common refrain is that nowhere is safe — and that, with more than 90 percent of the population displaced, there are few places left to go.
Mohammed Ramadan, whose family of 10 survived but lost their tent, said he felt trapped by impossible options: “There are no safe places, and no places left to shelter in.”
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