Charred bodies and screams: Witnesses describe scenes of horror at Rafah camp

Witnesses and survivors described a terrifying scene of tents in flames and burn victims after what the Gaza Health Ministry said was an Israeli strike on a tent camp housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

The health ministry said at least 45 people in the camp had been killed and 240 others wounded.

The Israeli military said that it had aimed a strike at a Hamas compound and killed two Hamas leaders. A legal official with the military said Monday that the strike was under review.

Bilal al-Sapti, 30, a construction worker in Rafah, said he saw charred bodies in the wreckage of the camp in the Tal as Sultan area of Rafah, and people screaming as firefighters tried to put out the flames.

“The fire was very strong and was all over the camp,” he said. “There was darkness and no electricity.”

Al-Sapti said shrapnel from the strike tore up the tent where he was staying with his wife and two children, but that his family was uninjured.

“What kind of a tent will protect us from missiles and shrapnel?” he said.

UNRWA, the main United Nations agency that aids Palestinians, described on the social media platform X what it called a “horrifying” attack and said the images emerging from the site were “yet another testament” that Gaza is “hell on earth.”

Multiple videos from the same location, verified by The New York Times, show fires raging through the night as people frantically pull bodies from the rubble and shout in horror as they carry away charred remains.

By morning, several shed-like structures were flattened, and cars were burned out, the footage shows. The sheds are part of a displaced persons camp known as the Kuwaiti Al-Salam Camp 1.

The Times verified that the locations seen in various videos showing fires raging and burned bodies are from the same camp, by comparing them to previous videos of the site from aid groups. In a statement on Instagram, one of the groups that supports the camp, Al-Salam Association for Humanitarian and Charitable Works, said that, besides dozens of deaths and hundreds of injuries, over 120 tents and dozens of toilets were burned and damaged, and that a water well was destroyed.

Adli Abu Taha, 33, a freelance journalist who was at a nearby field hospital run by the United Arab Emirates Red Crescent, said the dead and wounded began arriving there shortly after he heard two loud explosions.

“Several injured arrived without one or more limbs and were severely burned,” Abu Taha said. “The hospital soon became overwhelmed,” he added.

When Abu Taha went to the tent camp on Monday morning, all he could see was “destruction” coupled with “the smell of smoke and burned flesh,” he said. He said that some families were dismantling their tents and preparing to find another place to seek shelter.

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