At dawn on Thursday, Haitham Abu Ammar searched through the rubble of the school that had become a shelter for him and thousands of other displaced Gazans. For hours, he helped people rebuild the limbs of their loved ones.
“The most painful thing I have ever experienced in my life was picking up those pieces of meat with my hands,” said Abu Ammar, a 27-year-old construction worker. “I never thought I’d have to do something like this.”
Early Thursday, Israeli airstrikes hit the school complex, killing dozens of people, including at least nine militants, the Israeli military said.
Throughout the day, corpses and mangled limbs recovered from the rubble were wrapped in blankets, piled into vans and driven to Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the last major medical center still functioning in central Gaza.
Israel’s military described the airstrike as carefully planned. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told reporters that Israeli forces had followed the militants at the school-turned-shelter for three days before opening fire.
“The Israeli army and the Shin Bet found a solution to separate terrorists from those seeking refuge,” he said.
But accounts from local and foreign doctors, and a New York Times visit to the hospital Thursday afternoon, made clear that civilians also died.
Outside the hospital morgue, a crowd gathered to mourn and pray for the dead. The hospital hallways were filled with people asking for help, or at least a little comfort.
A little girl with a bloody leg screamed, “Mom! Mom!”, as her sobbing mother followed her through the hospital hallways.
The exact number of victims could not be verified, but the Gaza Health Ministry said that of the approximately 40 people who died in the attack, 14 were children and nine women. Later that day, The Associated Press reported different figures, saying at least 33 people died, including three women and nine children, citing the hospital morgue.
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital has become a symbol not only of the great loss of life in central Gaza, but also of the growing sense of desperation among Gazans struggling to find a place there that is still sure.
In recent weeks, the region has been filled with people fleeing another Israeli offensive, this one in the southern city of Rafah. Before that offensive began, Rafah was the main place of refuge for civilians and at one time housed more than half of the Gaza Strip’s population.
Then on Wednesday, Israel announced that it had launched a new operation against Hamas militants in central Gaza, the same place where many Gazans who had fled Rafah had ended up.
The attack on the school complex occurred early the next day, around 2 am. It hit a building in a compound run by UNRWA, the UN’s main Palestinian aid agency in Gaza.
Since the Israeli offensive in Gaza began in October, in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on Israel, those schools have been used to house Gazans forced from their homes by the fighting. Israel says Hamas hides its forces in civilian settings such as schools or hospitals, an accusation the group denies.
In the last two days of the new military campaign, Al Aqsa recorded 140 deaths and hundreds of injuries, health workers said.
“It’s total chaos, because we have mass casualties after mass casualties, but there are fewer and fewer medical supplies to treat them,” said Karin Huster, a nurse with the international aid group Doctors Without Borders who has been working at the hospital.
During the Times’ visit to Al Aqsa, doctors could be seen pushing through crowds of terrified people to try to reach operating theatres, delayed by the large mass of people. Amid the confusion, Huster said, doctors sometimes rushed people with fatal injuries to operating rooms, wasting vital time for those who still had a chance to survive.
Mrs Huster said most of the people she had treated in recent days were women and children.
Early Thursday afternoon, after burying a friend he pulled from the rubble of the school complex, Mr. Abu Ammar found himself once again in the hospital.
This time he was accompanied by his friend’s brother, whom he was trying to corner in a hallway near the entrance. The shrapnel cut the brother’s face and he had a deep cut on his right leg.
But he wasn’t the only one who desperately needed help.
Around them were injured people, some lying on the ground in their own blood, others in beds asking for help. A man whose face was blackened by burns and dust from that morning’s explosion begged two relatives accompanying him to fan his face with a piece of cardboard they waved over him.
The scenes among the dead in the morgue were almost as chaotic as those among the living. Bodies lay everywhere, while relatives crowded around, crying and shouting over them. The stench of blood was overwhelming.
The crowds outside the morgue wavered as bodies wrapped in blankets (shrouds were in short supply) were loaded onto vans to be taken to burial. Family and friends lined up to pray before the dead were carried away. Even passersby on the street stopped to join in.
“When is it too much?” said Mrs. Huster. “I no longer know how I can express this in a way that surprises people. What has humanity done wrong?