Even as rescue worker Abu Aish, 58, and his colleagues struggle to pry lifeless bodies from the concrete and twisted metal where residential towers once stood, the death toll keeps rising. Gaza’s Health Ministry has reported that Israel’s bombardment - launched after Hamas mounted a bloody, unprecedented attack on Israel on Oct 7 - has killed more than 2,700 Palestinians, many of them women and children.
“Those moments give me the will to carry on,” he said. “That’s my work. I never want to let one child like that die.”A mourner reacts as bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli strikes lie at a hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, October 17, 2023. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem Ali Ahad, a 37-year-old resident of Gaza City, said that when airstrikes levelled the residential building next door, rescuers never came.
Serious violations of international humanitarian law in Gaza, UN Security Council needs to do more: Human rights lawyer At dawn Monday, Israeli warplanes struck the headquarters of the Civil Defense in Gaza City, killing seven paramedics as they prepared for a rescue mission, the Interior Ministry said. In widely shared videos of the aftermath, medics, shellshocked and exhausted, crouched on the back of their blood-smeared ambulance with their heads in their hands.
Like most medics, Abu Aish has spent the past days in the hospital’s ambulance bay, sleeping a few hours before returning to his gruelling work. The massive blasts ripping through the northern Jabaliya refugee camp where he lives have been bad enough, he said.Since Israeli bombardment destroyed two of Gaza’s three main lines for mobile communication last week, he hasn’t spoken to his family in five days.
Residents say it often takes rescue crews many hours to reach the site of an attack and search for victims. By that point, the chances of finding additional survivors are slim.