CNN
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Bullet holes fleck the bloodstained walls of the Miqdad family home, in Nuseirat camp, central Gaza.
“We are civilians, and we have no connection to the resistance or anything or any faction. We have no connection to it at all.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released footage on June 16 showing forces in the Miqdad’s house on the same day as a high-profile hostage rescue operation nearby. In the heavily edited video, shared on social media and described as forces “securing the area” during the operation, members of the Israeli Paratroopers Reconnaissance Battalion appear to enter the home. The video does not show what happened on the third floor, where the family say they were attacked.
The allegations provide a window into the scale and force of this Israeli operation to free hostages taken during the attack on Israel last October. Eyewitnesses say they are still traumatized, after more than 270 Palestinians were killed and another 698 people injured on June 8, according to authorities in Gaza. Health staff said that hospitals, already stretched beyond their limits, were completely overwhelmed.
These extremely high reported casualty tolls prompted renewed warnings from human rights organizations who say Israel is not doing enough to protect civilians as it prosecutes its war, and that militants are endangering Palestinian lives.
The UN human rights office (OHCHR) warned that Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups may have committed war crimes through their actions. OHCHR spokesman Jeremy Laurence said the Israeli operation “seriously calls into question whether the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution… were respected” and that, by holding hostages in densely populated areas, Palestinian armed groups are “putting the lives of Palestinian civilians, as well as the hostages themselves, at added risk.”
It was not clear how many of those killed were militants. The Ministry of Health in Gaza does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. But the ministry said many of those impacted were women and children, as well as people recently displaced by Israel’s offensive in the southern city of Rafah.
The IDF said special forces teams launched the rescue operation in Nuseirat camp just after 11 a.m. local time, and by 11:25 a.m. had begun raids on both buildings where hostages were being held. After exchanging heavy fire with militants, and as the surrounding area came under intense Israeli missile and rocket fire, the special forces retrieved the hostages then started to travel out of the camp, toward an area near the US military’s floating pier on the Mediterranean coast.
“They left nothing behind. It’s all destroyed,” said the mother Rasha, speaking fourtwo days after the operation. “The room is full of blood. My children’s clothes are all blood.
“There is no safe place… no place where we can protect ourselves.”
Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza after the Hamas-led October 7 attacks on southern Israel, in which at least 1,200 people were killed and more than 250 others abducted.
Israeli attacks in Gaza have since killed 37,658 Palestinians and injured at least another 86,237 people, according to Gaza health officials.
He said he gathered his family – some 14 people, mostly women and children – into a room. The family trembled with fear as the voices of soldiers grew closer, until, they claim, the troops kicked down the door, opened indiscriminate fire, threw stun grenades and pointed weapons at some of the children.
Israeli troops detained the two men present and demanded to know whether there were any militants in the building, Mohammad said. He and his father-in-law, Abdul Raouf, 58, tried to declare their innocence. Then, they allege, soldiers forced bags over their heads, tied their hands behind their backs and physically assaulted them.
“He asked me to take off my clothes to make sure I was a little boy,” Ahmad recalled.
“He threw me to the ground and put blindfolds on me,” he said. “He wanted to tie me, but I started kicking with my feet, so he put his shoe here,” he said, pointing to his neck, “and stepped on me to silence me.
“They meant to kill me.”
It is not clear if any of the family members were hit in the second round of shooting.
One of their children, Mumen, 16, says he was shot in his shoulder and abdomen, while his younger brother, Yamen, 12, had bullet injuries to his abdomen and leg.
Instead, the family raced north by car to Al-Awda Hospital. But for Yamen, it was too late. “They gave him CPR for 10 minutes, but he was already martyred,” Mohammad said.
Hospital workers say they could not manage the flood of casualties from the daytime raid, which was carried out when the streets and market were busy with people. At least 250 Palestinians wounded in Nuseirat were transferred from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital to Nasser Hospital, according to health authorities.
Al-Aqsa hospital is serving nearly five times the number of in-patients it had pre-war with just one functioning electricity generator, the UN’s Office for Humanitarian Affairs reported on June 10. Footage from the hospital courtyard taken on June 8 shows trucks lined with shrouded bodies and men trying to comfort shellshocked children, as scores of Palestinians clamor to get seen by medics.
“There were many martyrs lying in the streets,” said Rasha’s mother, 54. “The street was full of people and the planes were shooting.”
“It was just like a plane crash had happened,” said Karin Huster, an MSF staffer who treated patients in the hours after the attack. “Pretty much everybody was on the floor, kids, women… hundreds of people.
Another health worker at Al-Aqsa hospital, Maryame El Abbassi, said she is emotionally scarred after treating a severely burned child whose face “was melting” between her hands.
“Those kids will be traumatized until the end of their life,” she said.
Mumen, who is still being treated for wounds to his shoulder and abdomen, having been moved to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, drew in labored breaths as he recalled what happened to his brother.
“My younger brother, Yamen, I saw them shooting him,” Mumen said on June 10. “They came into the room and simply shot us, without saying a word… My future is gone. My life is gone.”
