Description

Sally Sakr, 20-years-old, from the Palestinian centre for people with special needs lies in a hospital bed in Gaza City on July 12, 2014, after the center housing her was targeted by an Israeli air strike.(AFP/Mohammed Abed)

A hospital attendant checks on Ahmad Al-Awar, 28-years-old, from the Palestinian center for people with special needs as he lies on a bed in Gaza City on July 12, 2014.(AFP/Mohammed Abed)

The body of Suha Abu Saada, 28-years-old, lies in a mosque after the Palestinian center for people with special needs housing her in
Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip, was targeted by an Israeli air strike on July 12, 2014.(AFP/Mohammed Abed)
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GAZA CITY (AFP) -- Twenty-year-old Palestinian Sally Saqr lies in a hospital bed in Gaza's Shifa hospital with burns that have turned her cheeks an angry pink beneath her ventilation tube.

She survived an Israeli strike in the early hours of Saturday morning that hit a care home for Palestinians with special needs.

Two of her fellow residents were not so lucky.

Thirty-year-old Ola Washahi and 47-year-old Suha Abu Saada were killed when the rocket slammed into the home, destroying it.

The two women's body parts were still being pulled from the rubble hours later, causing initial confusion over whether another person had been killed.

The facility's director, Jamila Alaywa, is unable to contain her fury as she describes the tragedy that has befallen the center she set up in 1994.

"Both Ola and Suha had severe mental and physical handicaps, and had been living at the center since it was founded," she told AFP.

The building in northern Gaza's Beit Lahiya housed 13 residents, including some who were on weekend visits at their family homes when the strike hit.

Five residents and a helper were inside, screaming in terror as the building collapsed around them.

"They didn't understand what was happening and they were so frightened," Alaywa said.

"They fired the rocket and it hit us without any warning. There was no warning strike with an empty rocket," she said.

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New York Times

BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip — As Israel’s air war against Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters in Gaza entered its sixth day on Saturday, a pair of bombings threw the difficulties of the campaign into painful relief: Israel bombed a mosque, which its aerial photos indicated was harboring a weapons cache, and a center for the disabled, killing two residents and wounding three, as well as a caretaker.

A separate strike on the house of a police commander killed at least 18 people, the highest toll so far this conflict, bringing the total number of dead to at least 140, Palestinian officials said.

In response, Hamas fired a barrage of rockets at Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city, garnering much attention despite causing no deaths or injuries, as three of them were intercepted.

There were also signs of imminent escalation as the Israeli military said it was going to send messages to northern Gaza residents to vacate their homes “for their own safety,” amid preparations for a possible invasion.

The Interior Ministry in Gaza urged Palestinians to ignore the warnings, calling them psychological warfare.

But the Israeli military said early Sunday that four soldiers were slightly wounded during a brief incursion into northern Gaza to destroy a rocket launching site, according to The Associated Press. It is the first time that Israeli ground troops are known to have entered Gaza in this offensive, The A.P. said, but the raid was carried out by special forces and did not appear to be the beginning of a broad ground offensive.

The Israeli bombing of the center for the disabled, the Mabaret Palestine Society here in northern Gaza, occurred just before dawn, when a missile crashed through the roof and exploded. Because it was the weekend, only five of the 19 severely disabled residents were at the center, while the rest were with their families, said Jamila Elaiwa, who founded the center 20 years ago.

She spoke at Al Shifa hospital’s burn unit, while she was visiting the wounded, including Mai Hamada, 30, and Salwa Abu al-Qomssan, 53, the caretaker, both of them with severe burns. Two more residents were in intensive care. The dead were identified as Ula Wisha, 31, and Suha Abusada, 39, whose family said she had been born severely disabled and unable to speak.

Muhammad Abu al-Qomssan, 32, the caretaker’s eldest son, said that his mother “has a soft heart,” and felt fortunate to have found this new job only three weeks ago. She had been to predawn prayers and told him she had arrived only a few minutes before the bomb struck, he said.

Ms. Elaiwa, 59, said that her center was well-known in the neighborhood and that it had been in the same building for almost a decade. She said she had no idea why it would be bombed. “No one lived there except us,” she said. “There was no one else in the building.”

At the site, neighbors picked through the rubble of modest medical equipment and scattered children’s books, from the small neighborhood children’s library Ms. Elaiwa ran. There was a seared copy of “Jane Eyre,” condensed, in English with Arabic translation, and an English-language copy of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”

Neighbors like Yasir Abu Shoodq, 32, stared up at the sky through the holes the missile cut through the roof and each floor before making a crater in the ground. Children picked up the chunks of sharp steel from the crater and made off with them.

Mr. Abu Shoodq said, and Ms. Elaiwa confirmed, that there had first been a warning rocket, “a knock on the roof,” a few minutes before the missile hit. “But no one understood what it meant,” she said. “No one could imagine the center would be a target for anyone.” In any case, she said, the severity of the residents’ disabilities would have prevented them from fleeing on their own.

Azzedin Ali, 26, another neighbor, said angrily: “They are bankrupt of targets and of pity. What would the handicapped have been resisting? This is the enemy striking civilians in the places they think they are safe.”

As he spoke, perhaps a mile away, a rocket was launched from Gaza toward Israel, its contrail slightly wobbly in a hot, hazy sky.

In a rare Saturday briefing for reporters at Israeli military headquarters in Tel Aviv, a senior military official said, when asked, that the army was looking into what happened at the center for the disabled. “A group is investigating now what was the target, what was the intelligence,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with military protocol.

The briefing was an apparent effort to rebuff growing international alarm at the rising death toll from the airstrikes in Gaza and the calls for restraint.

The official spoke of the difficulties the air force faced in minimizing collateral damage in the densely populated environment of Gaza, describing the mission as “very challenging,” and showed video clips from the air that he said demonstrated the military’s care in targeting.