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JERUSALEM – Kamal Masoud was at home in the Jabalya refugee camp on Tuesday afternoon with his wife and five children. They were talking about how to survive a bombardment when the Israeli missiles hit.
“The entire area has been wiped out,” Masoud told The Washington Post by phone, hours after a series of Israeli strikes devastated his neighborhood in the northern Gaza Strip, leveling several residential buildings and leaving gaping craters in the concrete.
More than 110 people were killed and hundreds more injured in the attack, according to doctors at two nearby hospitals. It was apparently Israel’s deadliest air strike since the start of the war. The final number remained unclear, Palestinian officials said, as victims were still trapped under the rubble.
Masoud and his family survived. But 30 of his relatives were killed, he said, including children as young as two months old.
Israeli attacks on Jabalya refugee camp kill and injure hundreds in Gaza
“There is no safe place in the invasion,” he said of Israeli ground operations that have steadily expanded since Friday, part of what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the “second phase of the war.”
The attack on Jabalya offers a glimpse into the destruction wrought by Israel’s relentless air war across the Gaza Strip and the grave dangers faced by civilians as Israeli ground forces advance deeper into the enclave. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, at least 8,796 Gazans have been killed and 22,219 injured since the conflict began.
By geolocating the edges of the destruction and comparing them with satellite images, The Post found that the extent of the damage extended to about 50,000 square meters – almost the size of a football field – and that the impact toppled or scarred more than a dozen buildings. Debris from the explosion appears to have blackened roofs in several directions.
The Israeli military said the attack – the first of three to hit the densely populated camp in just over 24 hours – targeted and killed a senior Hamas commander, Ibrahim Biari. He helped coordinate the group’s attack on southern Israel on October 7, in which militants killed more than 1,400 people and took more than 230 hostages.
Israel Defense Forces spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said on Wednesday that other militants besides Biari had been killed, but did not give a number. Hamas spokesman Ali Barakeh told The Post on Wednesday that Biari was “fine” and was not at the scene of the attack.
“The way [Hamas] “We have no other way to build their infrastructure,” Hagari said, claiming the collapse of the Hamas tunnels contributed to the high death toll. “We work according to international law.”
Hagari could not provide details on the number of civilians killed and said an assessment was ongoing.
Another IDF spokesman, Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, was asked Tuesday night by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about why the military carried out the attack in such a populated area, saying it was a “very complex battle zone.”
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“But you know that there are also many refugees, many innocent civilians – men, women and children – in this refugee camp, right?” asked Blitzer Hecht.
“That’s the tragedy of war,” Hecht replied.
The toll of dead and injured from Jabalya overwhelmed hospitals on the verge of closure and rescue teams already struggling to cope with the scale of the destruction.
Into the evening, residents tried to dig people out of smoldering piles of crumbled cement, rebar and wood. In hospitals, bloody corpses carried on mattresses and improvised stretchers filled every available space on the floor. The beds were already full. Rows of corpses wrapped in white shrouds were piled up in front of the door.
Many rescue workers were unable to reach the site due to a lack of fuel and equipment, said Mahmoud Bassal, a spokesman for Gaza’s civil protection agency.
“An entire neighborhood was targeted,” Bassal said. “No one who was there escaped unscathed. … Even if there were someone connected to Hamas, would it make sense to treat them like that?”
Marc Garlasco, a military adviser to the Dutch organization PAX for Peace and a former U.N. war crimes investigator, said the craters he analyzed following images of the site were likely created by Joint Direct Attack Munitions, or JDAM delayed-fuse bombs .
A comparison of satellite images provided to the Post by Maxar Technologies, combined with photo and video evidence, shows at least five different impact sites where bombs fell. At least one crater was about 40 feet in diameter, according to the Post’s measurements, which Garlasco said suggests one of the munitions weighed about 2,000 pounds.
“When a 2,000-pound bomb hits the ground, the earth becomes liquid,” Garlasco wrote in a message to The Post. “It’s like an earthquake.”
Videos and photos confirmed by The Post show scenes similar to the aftermath of a natural disaster. Several buildings had collapsed. In search of survivors, people climbed up the mountains of rubble and down into the yawning craters.
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Israel has repeatedly warned Gazans to leave the north and move south to protect themselves from expanding ground operations. But Palestinians in the north have told the Post that they lack the resources to relocate and have no housing in the south. Some of the evacuees were killed while trying to escape or died in Israeli attacks in the south – in what is supposed to be a safe zone.
Hospitals are not always a place of refuge either. Strikes over the weekend caused “severe damage” near the Indonesian hospital in Gaza where many of the victims of Tuesday’s attack were treated, according to a spokesman for the Gaza Health Ministry. In one Video Posted on social media and geolocated by The Post, clouds of dust can be seen outside the hospital; People nearby wipe their eyes and cover their mouths.
On Friday, as Israeli troops made their largest-ever incursion into Gaza, Israel cut nearly all internet and telephone lines in the enclave for more than 30 hours. Communications networks were partially restored by Israel on Sunday under U.S. pressure, but internet and phone services remain intermittent and unstable.
In the hours after Tuesday’s strike, families desperately tried to reach relatives in Jabalya – unsure if the calls weren’t going through because phone batteries were dead or their loved ones were out of power.
Marwan Sultan, the director of the Indonesian hospital, told The Post that his staff killed at least 110 people and injured more than 300 after the initial attack.
Later that night, another Israeli attack hit another part of the camp, killing at least 20 people from the same family, according to Sultan.
On Wednesday, a third Israeli strike hit Fallujah’s Jabalya neighborhood, wounding dozens, Sultan said, adding that he expected the number of casualties to rise.
“We are still getting more victims, including amputees and [people with] internal bleeding in the brain,” he said in a telephone interview. “Unfortunately, after a few hours we have to stop work in the operating rooms,” he said, due to a lack of fuel. There are still “dozens of people under the rubble,” he added.
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Wednesday’s attack – which the IDF said targeted a Hamas “command and control complex” – came during another hours-long, near-total communications blackout.
“We had to call our teams over loudspeakers and ask them to go to the target location to save lives,” Sultan said.
Hussam Abu Safiya, director of pediatrics at Kamal Adwan Hospital, said his staff had picked up dozens of bodies and hundreds of injured since Tuesday afternoon, with each attack adding to the carnage.
Sometimes “we are unable to deal with injuries,” he said, because the smell of death is “suffocating.”
Harb reported from London and Kelly from Washington. Jarrett Ley in New York and Sarah Dadouch in Beirut contributed to this report.