Nihayah Jaradeh
13 July 2024
A 47-year-old from Gaza City, Nihayah described the massacre at the IDP camp in al-Mawasi, Khan Yunis:
On 7 October 2023, I was displaced from my home in Gaza City in the northern Strip and went to the al-Mawasi area of Khan Yunis, in the south. I live in a tent with my brothers and their families. Thousands of IDPs have come to this area and it’s extremely crowded. We fled here because the Israeli military ordered us to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip and designated this place as a humanitarian zone. But from the very first days, the military has also been bombing this area with planes, artillery and tanks. We’ve had shrapnel reach our tent several times, and displaced people have been injured and killed by the bombings. We’re staying here despite the danger because we have nowhere else to go. There is no safe place to move to.
Today, Saturday, 13 July 2024, at around 10:30 A.M., I was sitting in the tent drinking tea after I didn’t sleep all night because of the sounds of the planes. Suddenly, I saw four or five huge missiles, each one several meters long, land about 200 meters from me. It was like Judgment Day: massive blasts, balls of fire and hell raining down on us, stones, trees and sand flying everywhere. The sound of the quadcopters shooting mixed with the screaming in the camp. There were dismembered bodies and bits of flesh everywhere, bodies of children, women and men. I fled with my brothers and everyone around me, scared to death. I ran with my hands over my head, as if that would protect me if another missile landed.
I went a little way toward the tents that were bombed and saw young men rescuing wounded people, giving them first aid and taken them away on donkey-drawn carts. I saw charred bodies of children and saw women splattered with blood, without head coverings, running away screaming. What happened there cannot be put into words. The ambulances and Civil Defense crews arrived only after half an hour, and then drones attacked the Civil Defense crews as well. The scene was horrific. It was a dreadful catastrophe. People were swallowed up in the sand craters created by the bombs. Ambulances continued evacuating the dead and wounded until evening, because there were so many casualties.
I’m completely drained. It was the hardest day we’d had since the war began. We are at exhausted and wish for death already, or for someone to find a solution because we can’t go on like this. This isn’t living. What is happening here is extermination. It’s a massacre of the people of Gaza. Share our voices with the world: we are innocent. Stop the war, stop the massacre, stop the extermination.
* Testimony given to B'Tselem field researcher Olfat al-Kurd on 13 July 2024