A 32-year-old father of two and resident of Gaza City, Muhammad al Ghrab was displaced to the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis by order of the army, and recounted the day the displacement camp was bombed, killing nearly 100 people.
Up until the war that started in October 2023, I lived with my wife and two children–Zein, 2.5, and Malak, 10 months–in a small apartment we rented. I worked as a shuttle driver, and even though I had a low salary, I managed to provide for my family and pay rent.
When the war broke out, Malak was just four-days-old. When the bombings intensified, we moved to the al-Iskan al-Abaya d area of the Tel a-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah. We set up a small tent and experienced a very harsh winter there, in the intense cold and strong winds. The tent was on a street. We felt like we didn’t have any shelter–like we were really sleeping on the street. We would hear the voices of people coming and going outside, and the sound of cars as if they were in the tent with us, and they heard us, too.
We suffered all the time from the crowded conditions, the noise and the smoke that filled the area, because we and all the other displaced people cooked, baked and made tea on bonfires. My wife also boiled water for Malak’s formula on the fire. The smoke caused us headaches and breathing problems. And getting enough wood for the bonfires wasn’t easy.
We lived in very difficult conditions. We had a hard time getting food and water because the prices jumped like crazy. Sometimes I managed to work as a taxi driver for a meager 20-30 NIS [$6-9 USD] per shift just so I could provide food for my family. We ate canned food all the time because that’s what we managed to get.
On 7 May 2024, after the Israeli army invaded Rafah, we dismantled our tent, packed our things and fled to Khan Younis. We pitched it in the al-Mawasi area, on a street that connects the coastal road to Al-Aqsa University.
We moved to the area according to the Israeli army’s orders, which stated that it was safe. Masses of people moved there: women, elderly people, young children–all the families that were displaced from Rafah because of the invasion. The amount of displaced people in the area was totally absurd, the human brain can’t process it. Everybody moved to Khan Younis. Our tents were on a-Nus street in the market, which was still functioning.
On Saturday, 13 July 2024, at 10:30 A.M., my father and I were shopping. We bought a few cans of food and what we were able to get from the market’s stalls for my family and myself. Suddenly I heard a huge, terrifying explosion. It was only 300 meters from us. An enormous cloud filled the sky, and the intensity of the explosion was bigger than I’d ever experienced–including throughout the war.
Then more, really terrifying explosions started to go off really close to us. We started to run. My dad and I hid behind a small mound of sand and laid on the ground to protect ourselves from the rockets and shrapnel that were falling all around us.
Suddenly, a ring of fire formed, after a number of rockets were launched one after the other at the tents. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. It looked like the apocalypse. I think eight rockets fell in a row! The sky was completely covered in clouds, dust and dirt . People started running in all directions.
All of a sudden I saw fighter jets come back and start bombing the vehicles on the street–both the ones that were driving and the parked cars. I swear I saw bodies fly in the air. I swear I saw men, women and children whose bodies were in shreds–some burned, some torn in two, and there were people whose flesh was spread all over the street.
We froze in the face of it all, we couldn’t do anything. But it didn’t end there. The moment they bombed us, a big group of drones appeared and they started firing rounds at the displaced people, shooting everyone who moved. They shot right at people’s heads. Most of the market’s vendors were killed–people that were sitting behind their stalls and in their shops. The machine guns hit women who were hiding behind cars, women who were fleeing towards the sea. None of them were spared. There were many bodies on the street.
In the same instant, ambulances and civil defense cars arrived, and we started running towards them to hide behind them. And then, the Occupation’s planes started firing next to those cars so that they couldn’t rescue the injured people that were lying on the ground, some of them crying out for help. I saw the civil defense members also get injured from the shooting and shrapnel. I and a few others started evacuating injured people to safer areas.
After they sowed death for half an hour, the bombing and the shooting stopped, and the cloud of dust and smoke rose and started to scatter. We could now see better. We saw huge pits between the tents, strewn body parts, and bodies buried beneath the sand from the intensity of the explosions.
We started rescuing injured people, as many as we could. Some lost hands, others legs. There were at least 100 of them. Some of the people we rescued died in our hands. When we entered the tents that were still standing, we saw they were full of bodies, mostly of women and children.
What we saw that day, at that hour, was like the embodiment of madness. Something incomprehensible. It felt like pieces of hell were falling onto the earth. It’s impossible to truly describe. Language fails. It can’t contain the horrors we witnessed. What I’m describing is only a small part of the horror that took place.
After that incident, and after they bombed a place that was supposed to be safe and where there were so many displaced people, children and women, I understood that we have nowhere to go. We don’t have strength to cope with the horrors. We are being killed, and those of us who are spared from death are hurled all over the place with no safe place to rest. Death is chasing us. We could have been hurt that day even though we have no connection to any organization.
I’ve been afraid ever since that day. I keep expecting the tents to be bombed and for me and my family to die in a similar strike. . In the meantime we continue on in the same routine: We still live in a tent, light bonfires, eat unhealthy food, suffer from the heavy heat, flies and insects, from the chaos that’s been created here, and from the constant fear of the bombs and the war in general. The endless pressure and stress exhaust us, robbing us of all our strength.
* This testimony was given to B’Tselem field researcher Muhammad Sabah on 20 July 2024