The survivors of the Christmas massacre in the center of the Gaza Strip: "There was a silence of terror and we began to hear the screams of the wounded"

“The bombs fell very quickly one after another. Maybe five or six, all very powerful. Boom… boom… after less than half a minute it was all over and the four buildings located 400 meters away were reduced to rubble. “For a moment there was a terrified silence, waiting for the Israeli planes to strike back, but only the drone of a drone could be heard in the darkness. That's when we started to hear the screams of the wounded.”

Mussa's story comes from the heart of the tormented Gaza Strip. It is not easy to reach residents by phone. Those who still have charged batteries are forced to climb the tallest buildings left standing to try to intercept the signal from the Israeli lines. Mussa is 37 years old, he is a mathematics teacher at the public school in the Maghazi refugee camp, in the eastern sector of the central region of Gaza, he is married. His wife is a pharmacist in nearby Khan Yunis, and he has three children.. The oldest is 10 years old and his name is Hassan; The youngest is a 3-year-old girl.

The Israeli Army continues its offensive on the Gaza Strip this Wednesday, where there are already some 21,000 dead and 55,000 injured

Without prior notice

For them, the fact that the 24th was Christmas Eve matters little.. They are Muslims, but it matters that that night one of the worst massacres in recent days occurred in the entire Strip. Within seconds, Israeli shells killed around 70 people and wounded dozens more.. According to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, most of the victims were “women and children.”

As of yesterday, Tuesday, updated bulletins reported “more than a hundred dead, many still under the rubble.”. “It was shortly after 10:30 p.m.. I know this because our kids had just gone to bed.. We heard the bombs falling, as usual, in the northern areas, including Gaza City and the large Jabalia refugee camp.. The Israelis had given no warning, no signal that they would attack Maghazi,” Mussa continued.

They were relatively calm, with the illusion that they would be warned if an attack occurred. They fled northern Gaza two months ago following the pamphlets and even direct phone calls the Israelis made urging people to evacuate.. In normal times, Maghazi is inhabited by about 20,000 people, virtually all descendants of the refugees who abandoned their homes and villages at the time of the war for the birth of Israel in 1948.. Some 40,000 displaced people from northern Gaza have joined them since the end of October, with their homes reduced to rubble.

The destruction

But it was not like that. “We did not see any Hamas militants. We do not know of the existence of tunnels or military positions of the organization in the damaged area,” says Mussa.. He knows the names of the victims' family clans by heart, because many of their neighbors who fled the north lived in the affected buildings: Abu Handa, Al Nawazra, Abu Rachma, Ghaben, Msallam, Qandil, Abu Awad. Their places of origin are in Ramleh, Bashet, Ashkelon (the ancient Arab Majdal), Qatra: all places that are now part of southern Israel. And they have so instilled the memory of the Nakba, as Palestinians call the “tragedy” of their flight in 1948 from the onslaught of Israeli forces, that they now inevitably experience the drama as a miniature repetition of that period.

“There was no reason to destroy those buildings and kill their inhabitants. But we are witnessing the Israeli plan to instill fear in us and induce us to flee abroad, preventing us from returning.. “Where are we going to live if there are no houses left?” he asks.. Immediately after the explosions, he realized that all his windows had shattered and his children had been injured by glass shards.. “It was my fault,” he says. “Normally we keep the windows open to reduce the effects of the bombs. But that night it was cold.”