‘Everyone is gone’: Witness describes devastation in northern Gaza after deadly Israeli strike
People in northern Gaza were calling for more help on Tuesday after a deadly Israeli airstrike on a building in Beit Lahiya, which witnesses said was sheltering displaced people, including women and children. (Warning: This video contains images showing covered bodies and an injured person.)
WARNING: This story contains an image of a child killed in an airstrike.
Abdel Fattah Abu Al-Nasr, 60, rocked back and forth, sobbing and covered in dust.
“My children are dead, my grandchildren are dead,” he told a freelance videographer working with CBC on Tuesday through tears, struggling to compose himself.
“Everyone is gone.”
The family members he lost were among the at least 93 Palestinians killed in an Israeli strike on a residential building in Beit Lahiya on Tuesday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Dozens more were wounded in the city in northern Gaza.
Local medics said at least 20 children were among the dead.
“A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defence crews cannot reach them,” the Health Ministry said in a statement.
“[I am] the only survivor from the entire family,” said Mohammed Naguib Abu Al-Nasr, another Beit Lahiya resident.
The six-storey building had about 300 people in it when it was bombed at 4 a.m., he said. Al-Nasr was not inside at the time, having left in the wake of an earlier strike on a neighbouring building.
“I came home, and I could barely get 10 [people] out.”
Mahmoud Abu Al-Nasr helped with recovering the bodies of people after the strike.
“There are no ambulances anymore or any help,” he said, describing the reduction in first responders since Palestinian Civil Defence, which oversees emergency services, pulled out of northern Gaza earlier this week because its workers were being targeted..
He described finding a body crushed under debris, with one leg sticking out. He and other residents had to sever the leg in order to recover the body.
“We are asking the world: We need ambulances in the north,” he said. “The situation is catastrophic.”
The Israel Defence Forces said in a statement to U.S. media outlets that it was “aware of reports that civilians were harmed” in Tuesday’s strike and was looking into the details. CBC News has also reached out to the Israeli military for comment.
Video footage obtained by Reuters showed several bodies wrapped in blankets on the ground outside a bombed four-storey building. More bodies and survivors were being retrieved from under the wreckage as neighbours rushed to help with the rescue.
On Monday, Palestinian Civil Defence said around 100,000 people were marooned in Jabalia, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun without medical or food supplies. Reuters could not verify the number independently.
The Gaza Health Ministry said on Tuesday those wounded in the strike could not receive care as doctors had been forced to evacuate the nearby Kamal Adwan Hospital.
“Critical cases without intervention will succumb to their destiny and die,” the ministry said in a statement.
Deadly violence in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley
Gaza’s war has kindled wider conflict in the Middle East, with Israel bombing Lebanon and sending forces into its south to disable Iran-backed Hezbollah, a Hamas ally.
The strike Tuesday in Gaza came a day after Israel’s parliament passed a law to ban the UN relief agency UNRWA from operating inside the country, alarming some of Israel’s Western allies who fear it will worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.
WATCH l Guterres condemns Israeli move on UNRWA:
UN chief condemns Israeli law banning UNRWA from country
UN Secretary-General António Guterres says the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA is ‘indispensable’ and that the implementation of a law banning it from operating in Israel ‘could have devastating consequences for Palestine refugees in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.’
Israeli officials cited the involvement of a handful of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees staffers in the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, and a few staffers’ membership in Hamas and other armed groups. UNRWA’s Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini described the move as “collective punishment.”
The decision represents a form of collective punishment for the people of Gaza if fully implemented, UN agencies said on Tuesday.
“If UNRWA is unable to operate, it’ll likely see the collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza,” said UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who has worked extensively in Gaza in the past year. “So a decision such as this suddenly means that a new way has been found to kill children.”
The Oct. 7, 2023 attack led by Hamas on Israel killed 1,200 people and more than 250 hostages were captured and taken into Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.
The death toll from Israel’s retaliatory air and ground onslaught in Gaza has exceeded 43,000, the Gaza Health Ministry said.
In Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, rescue workers were still pulling bodies out of the rubble on Tuesday morning.
Israel has ramped up its air strikes across Lebanon over the last month, saying it is targeting Hezbollah. Lebanese officials, rights groups and residents of affected towns say the strikes are indiscriminate.
No evacuation orders were given for any of the towns struck overnight. District Gov. Bachir Khodor said 67 people had been killed and more than 120 wounded and the death toll was expected to rise.
Large swaths of the Bekaa Valley are Hezbollah strongholds.
There was no immediate comment from Israel on the attacks.
WATCH l Older Lebanese fear brain drain amid ‘failed state’ and war:
What the latest conflict could mean for Lebanon’s future
Even before Israel and Hezbollah began exchanging fire in their latest conflict, Lebanon was on shaky ground, with some calling it a failed state. CBC’s Margaret Evans examines the complex factors behind the country’s eroding stability.
More than 2,700 people have been killed by Israeli bombardments of Lebanon since Israel’s military and Hezbollah began exchanging fire more than a year ago in parallel to the war in Gaza. At least two-thirds were killed in the last five weeks alone, when Israel stepped up its bombing campaign.
The expanded strikes have targeted the port city of Tyre. On Monday, Israel issued a new evacuation order for swaths of the city and carried out strikes that damaged the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders, which sit within the evacuation zone.
The strikes and detonation of homes have left towns along Lebanon’s border with Israel in ruins, according to satellite imagery.
Hezbollah names new leader
Israel strikes in recent weeks have killed Hezbollah’s secretary general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and other senior figures from the group, considered a terrorist organization by several Western governments including Canada.
Deputy secretary general Sheikh Naim Qassem, a veteran member of the militant group, was elected its head on Tuesday.
The group’s capabilities were intact despite “painful blows” from Israel, Qassem said.
Qassem was appointed deputy chief in 1991 by the armed group’s then-secretary general Abbas al-Musawi, who was killed by an Israeli helicopter attack the following year.
Qassem remained in his role when Nasrallah became leader, and has long been one of Hezbollah’s leading spokesmen, conducting interviews with foreign media including as cross-border hostilities with Israel raged over the last year.
Born in 1953 in Beirut to a family from Lebanon’s south, Qassem’s political activism began with the Lebanese Shi’ite Amal Movement.
He left the group in 1979 in the wake of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, which shaped the political thinking of many young Lebanese Shia activists. Qassem took part in meetings that led to the formation of Hezbollah, established with the backing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
