In Khan Yunis, where smoke spread through the air, a group of men shouted Allahu akbar (God is the greatest) as he runs through the streets with a body wrapped in a white shroud. “There are bombings everywhere. We have no food, we have no water, we have no clothes. The shops are closed, it is cold and the border control is closed,” summarizes 47-year-old Marwa Saleh, who sought refuge in Khan Yunis after being expelled from the northern city of Gaza. ‘When will the world see us as human beings?’ he asked.

In the rubble of a bomb-destroyed house in the city of Rafah, southern Gaza, a man shouted: “Where are my children?” Similar scenes unfolded in the devastated Gaza Strip on Friday, as residents fled their homes and took their dead and wounded to hospitals following the resumption of hostilities between Israel and Hamas following the end of a weeklong ceasefire.

The extension of the lull in the fighting – during which the flow of aid to Gaza increased and dozens of Israeli hostages were exchanged for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners – did not materialize. With the Israeli airstrikes, Gazans left their homes for safer areas, filling the streets with cars, trucks, tractors, carts, bicycles, and especially people on foot.

During the nearly two months between the attack and the implementation of the ceasefire a week ago, Israel’s brutal air and ground campaign against Hamas has killed more than 15,000 people, including mostly civilians, according to the Gaza government led by the Islamist group . On Friday evening, the Hamas-led Health Ministry said at least 178 people, including children, had been killed across the territory.

Sitting on a bed at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Amal Abu Dagga wept, her beige veil covered in blood. “I don’t even know what happened to my kids,” he said. A relative, Jamil Abu Dagga, told AFP that the family was at home when the bombs started falling. “My house is destroyed, as is my neighbor’s,” he said, with a bandage around his head. Another family member, Anas Abu Dagga, 22, noted: “The war is back, even more intense.”

War on children

At the hospital reception, 10-year-old Lina Hamdan said: “We were getting ready to go to bed when I heard a bomb. My brothers started screaming.”

In Rafah, where many Palestinians fled after Israel ordered them to leave the area’s north, a young man hurriedly pulled a seriously injured child from an explosion-hit refugee camp, while others were able to pull a motionless person from the rubble. .

One of the displaced, Manal Mohammad, said she was staying in a house in Rafah filled with dozens of relatives and did not know what else she could do. “They are bombing everywhere. Where do they want us to go?” he said. “We told ourselves that the ceasefire would last and that we would return home, but they don’t want us to live,” he continued. “They tell people, ‘Go south,’ and once they get there, they tell them, ‘Go west,’ and they bomb them.”

In the north of the Gaza Strip, the fireball from a large explosion could be seen across the border in the Israeli town of Sderot, and an AFPTV camera broadcast live footage of clouds of gray smoke and the sounds of automatic fire in the early 1990s. minutes after the end of the armistice.

From an unidentified hospital in Gaza, UNICEF spokesman James Elder said in a video on X that a bomb had fallen “50 meters away”. “I cannot emphasize enough how much hospital capacity has been reduced,” he said. “We can no longer see children with war wounds, with burns, with shrapnel scattered across their bodies, with broken bones. This is a war on children,” he added.

Marwa Saleh, a Gaza City resident seeking refuge in Khan Yunis, said she and her family are civilians and have “nothing to do” with this war. “I don’t want to die and I don’t want to lose anyone.”