A senior Red Cross official in Gaza on Saturday told reporters about horrific scenes following Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip.
Three explosions hit the walls of the Red Cross compound in Gaza at about 3.30pm on Friday, ICRC local head William Schomburg told reporters in Geneva via video link.
The head of an international charity in Rafah reported that there was a “flood of injured people” seeking help.
“There were piles of bodies, blood everywhere,” he said.
22 people were killed in the shelling, which caused minor damage to the outer walls of the compound where the Red Cross was working.
It is located just south of the humanitarian zone marked by the Israeli military in the Palestinian territory.
“All of our buildings are well known to all parties involved in the conflict,” Schomberg said.
“We are not here to assign blame,” he said, declining to speculate on the source of the gunfire.
“But of course, this incident is just one of many near-accidents that we have had … and we at the ICC cannot function like that.”
‘Ponds of Blood’
Many of the injured were taken by ambulance to a nearby Red Cross field hospital for surgery. Some did not survive.
Schomburg said no Red Cross workers were killed, but two children of workers required medical treatment for injuries sustained in the blasts.
It is not the first time that Red Cross facilities have been damaged during the more than eight-month-long battle between Israel and Hamas militants who control the Gaza Strip.
Schomburg said recovering from the trauma of Friday’s strike won’t be easy.
“There were pools of blood around the compound, on the road; bodies were scattered on the ground,” he said.
“We found body parts scattered at various places, including the campus.
“To be honest, this is something I’ve never seen before. Such a great amount of suffering in such a short period of time was really shocking for the team.”
‘Extreme’ fear
The shelling comes as Israel has stepped up its attacks in the Gaza Strip since the war broke out following a Hamas attack on October 7. According to an AFP count based on Israeli official figures, the Hamas attack on October 7 resulted in the deaths of 1,194 people, most of them civilians.
The militants also seized hostages, 116 of whom remain in Gaza, though the military says 41 have been killed.
Gaza’s health ministry said on Saturday that at least 37,551 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in Israel’s counter-attack.
The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement on Saturday that a preliminary investigation found “there was no direct attack on the Red Cross installation by the IDF.”
But the incident is still being reviewed and “its findings will be presented to our international partners”.
The Red Cross office is surrounded by a camp where many families of ICRC staff members live in tents. Schomberg said it was a “miracle” that no one was seriously injured.
“Still the sense of fear was very high among people, they were obviously terrified and very desperate because they had nowhere to go,” he said.
Thousands of displaced Palestinians have been taking refuge in tents in the coastal al-Mawasi area since the fighting began, leading Israeli authorities to recognise it as a humanitarian zone.
“Our office in Rafah, like all our buildings and facilities, is marked with the Red Cross emblem and is known to all parties,” Schomberg said.
“So how do you explain the attacks we saw yesterday? I think you have to ask the parties involved in the conflict, not us.”
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