Within seconds it was a little Baghdad

Large numbers of bodies, large numbers of wounded, and every minute another wounded is added to the list of those dead, and there is no longer space in the morgue. Relatives search among the dead and wounded so they can quickly bring their dead to burial. A woman has three school-age children killed. They are piled one on top of the other in the morgue, and she is screaming and crying and screaming again and then quiet. Mustafa Ibrahim managed to see all of that on Saturday at one o'clock in the Shifa hospital in Gaza. As a field investigator for a human rights organization, he thought he had been immunized but nothing had prepared him for these sights. Patients whose condition was not serious were requested to leave the hospital so there would be free beds.

Dr Haidar Eid is a lecturer in cultural studies at Al-Aqsa University. He, too, saw the bodies and the wounded on Saturday at the hospital. Also the children who had lost limbs. "To choose an hour like 11:30, in order to bomb in the heart of the cities, is terrible," he says. "That choice was aimed at causing as big a massacre as possible."

Abu Muhammad was at a distance of 200 meters from the hospital, when a dreadful noise was heard. Three large police centers are located near the hospital. "Within seconds, it was a little Baghdad," he said. "There were explosions everywhere, smoke, fire, people not knowing where to hide. Fear, anger and hatred in every place."

He himself ran to his daughters' school, like tens of thousands of other parents all over the Gaza Strip. At 11:25 A.M. or 11:30, when 50 fighter bombers attacked their targets, there were hundreds of thousands of children on the streets. Some of them had just finished the first shift of studies and others were on their way to start the second shift. "I saw 500 frightened fledglings, young girls who clung to me, crying, even though the do not know me", Abu Muhammad related.

In the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood alone, there were 43 dead. One large mourners' tent was set up for them all. Most of them were young policemen who had joined the civilian police force and were killed at the ceremony marking the end of their course. Training camps belonging to the military wing of Hamas, Iz al-din al-Qassam, as well as investigation and detention centers, had been emptied before the air-raids. But police centers in the Strip that offer services to citizens were chockablock. No one dreamed they would be bombed. In the afternoon hours, they were still searching for victims among the ruins. 

Khalil Shahin was in a hurry to reach the police station in the center of the Gaza Strip — "a gigantic building and everything is now on the ground," he said. Some 30 people were killed there. He knew that his nephew, a civilian, had been killed when he went to check something at the police station.

Umm Salah, a teacher, at first thought that the explosion was a supersonic boom. The entire building rocked, as did all the window panes. But the smoke, and the clouds of dust, and the wailing of the ambulance sirens, made her realize that something far worse had happened. Some of the pupils were injured by glass from the windows. Some cried, others kept quiet, in shock. In the chaos on the street, she found her son who had been doing a test in mathematics when the bombing started. They went home together and there they found the little son with the 70-year-old grandmother, who was trying to hide her fear as she took care of the grandchildren. "There has hardly been any electricity the whole of the past week, There is no cooking gas or flour or bread. Now the bombs," Umm Salah summed up the situation.

"But suddenly there was electricity again, and I turned on the TV and I saw the scenes, so I turned the TV off and sent the children off to do their homework."